Units

LoUIsE - Landscape, Urbanism, Infrastructures and Ecologies

LoUIsE - Laboratory on Landscape, Urbanism, Infrastructures and Ecologies - is focusing on the dynamics of transformations of metropolitan territories. LoUIsE is based in the Brussels-Capital Region. The research goes beyond the discipline of urbanism to take on environmental, infrastructural, and social issues concerning cities and urban territories in the larger sense. Affiliated members are indeed convinced it is flows, networks, and infrastructures that make up the global framework from which urbanism's contemporary territories are organized. Research in LoUIsE laboratory takes shape first and foremost through research made in the context of doctoral and postdoctoral theses, financed by the National Scientific Research Fund, the regional initiative Innoviris and the European Regional Development Fund.

Projetcs

Water urbanism

Worldwide, urban areas are being challenged to improve the conventional stormwater management regime (i.e. the totality of beliefs, rules and practices that guide water management activities). Illustrated as the Water Sensitive City, the envisioned new regime aims to solve water problems, to adapt to future uncertainties (e.g. increase of extreme events), to create a more liveable urban environment and to reflect the aspiration of the community related to water. Brussels-Capital Region (BCR) is a representative case for experiencing a transition towards a WsC. This research explores the hypothesis of how alternative actions contribute to a transition in the water regime in dense urban areas with a low level of water-related hazards by investigating different case studies located in BCR. The capacity of alternative actions to trigger changes in the regime is conditioned by the processes that produce them and by their influence on the emergence of subsequent actions. More specifically, the co-production of alternative actions provides viable solutions to current challenges and sets the conditions for trying the principles of the new regime in a particular context. The new stormwater management regime that favours this process relies on an adaptable infrastructure, as well as a different type of practice of who plans, designs, constructs and manages this new infrastructure, and how.