The project ‘WegenWerken’ (RoadWorks) looks into the role of soft connections in the city of Genk to visualise and encourage their future as public spaces by contributing to community life, local economy and sustainability. We are interested in learning how a participatory design approach can help us understand, test and activate them as spaces of productive potential in city-making. We experimented with different participatory mapping tools leading to interactive design output including a slow road network map of Genk as well as a toolkit with actions to realise and activate this network. Both are framed and informed by an in-depth interaction between the scale of the city (the network) and the scale of the neighborhood (the path). We will exhibit the different mapping tools produced within this project and an interactive map which will engage the visitors to use or complete the toolkit of actions by looking into the space of connections between the cities of Hasselt and Genk. Here, we aim to explore the performative and political characteristics of the mapping tools in relation to the participatory framework.

Project by Mela Zuljevic, Barbara Roosen and Liesbeth Huybrechts (De Andere Markt)