Development Verviers User-friendly City

Programme

Regeneration of the city centre through appropriable public spaces.

Against the backdrop of economic decline and social marginalization, this project aims to regenerate the city centre of Verviers by reorganizing its open, public spaces: redesigned, planted and reconnected, they aim to restore the historic centre to its wounded community. The main lines of development in the urban centre (the Vesdre with its quays, the sequence linking the central squares and the Verviers West shopping centre, and the historic axis between the station and the Town Hall) are enhanced, regenerated and reconnected to the wider landscape of the Vesdre valley and its hillsides through a mesh of open spaces, designed on multiple scales. The versatility of the spaces, which are flexible and multifunctional, allows free appropriation and the coexistence of different uses: major events as well as day-to-day life, intimate and communal, cultural and commercial. The pathways, punctuated by paved and planted sequences, small squares and recreational spaces of varying nature and size, create a public continuum which is varied and never dull. Rather than simply designing a patchwork of quality public spaces, the project takes on a greater challenge: the construction and coordination of a system of spaces capable of working in concert and aiming to transform the way we look at and use the city centre. The backdrop of the historic centre, interrupted and out of sight, becomes a "garden" inviting the inhabitants of Verviers to move across their town through a sequence of terraces and "clearings" between the Vesdre and the hillsides.

Martina Barcelloni Corte