Yuri Gerrits
Stubborn Grounds
Incremental transformation in the urban crust
‘Stubborn Grounds’ focuses on the mechanisms and repercussions of urban transformation processes at the small grain in the urban tissue.
It investigates the production of built form and space as the result of incremental change as it occurred throughout history, and it explores alternatives in the face of today’s urban challenges, in particular in the context of Flanders Centre-Cities.
This research looks into the possibilities of a method of “responsive urbanism”, that aims for structural urban change, through the accumulation of small corrections and substitutions, parcel per parcel, project per project. Responsive Urbanism discards the reproduction, repetition and homogenisation of built form that comes out of generic building codes, and equally, refrains from the conventional top-down approaches as in most of today’s masterplans. Instead, Responsive Urbanism works with the unavoidable unpredictability of incremental transformation and celebrates “the architectural project” itself as the instant interpretation of, and response to, the existing context it is part of, and adds value to.
As such, responsive urbanism embraces the recalcitrance of the ‘Stubborn Grounds’. Valuing the thick urban landscape as it exists in the dense composition of natural, cultural and urban layers, with all its anomalies and contrasts. And seeing architecture as a means to reconcile and amplify differences and peculiarities in the urban tissue, that is always an aggregation of fragments and conflicts, rather than the immaculate projection of one single idea or concept.