Three cities - Leuven, Mechelen and Kortrijk, each with a climate district - were chosen from the applications, and a multidisciplinary design and research team was appointed for each of the projects.
The learning trajectory Climate Neighbourhoods starts from the hypothesis that it offers multiple advantages to address
- linking different energy, climate and space challenges,
- tackle transformation at the scale of the neighbourhood
- and focusing on a more collective, area-oriented and integrated approach.
Indeed, the district forms an intermediate scale at which the interaction between energy consumption, mobility, building structure, space use, water management, material consumption and biodiversity can be investigated and imagined through design.
Testing that hypothesis, apart from providing many valuable insights, also raises a number of new questions that policy, research and practice need to pursue.
