Thriving Streets in Antwerp – towards a dynamic centre for Deurne

Deurne is a densely populated district in the 20th century belt of Antwerp with 80.000 inhabitants. The district is dominated by wide roads and currently misses a clear centre. Most of the streets – including Frank Craeybeckxlaan, where the temporary intervention took place – are designed to facilitate rapid, unobstructed flow of car traffic. The Antwerp project team created a temporary intervention in the local district centre that was implemented from November 2020 until August 2021. The goal of this intervention was to experiment with lane reduction and ways to calm traffic on a small section of the street while also creating a more pedestrian-friendly space and some small squares for pleasant stay.

The temporary intervention was unsuccessful in the traditional sense. It led to protests of shop-owners, residents and users (especially cyclists and motorists) – and in the end the district administration decided to remove it and restore the original status.

After an extensive survey with more than 500 respondents, our team learned to better understand and frame the often very justified concerns. Important takeaways for the planned redesign of the street in 2024 – 2025 are:

Creating a public space does not mean that people will automatically start to use it.

We learned that the local context in Antwerp can be very different for each district, and although recipes can be shared, a tailor-made process is indispensable.

Actively involve residents in the process for temporary interventions, starting with the design phase.

Good tools are key to kickstart and maintain a good conversation with local residents and retailers, and to implement their proposals. It required continuous iteration of the collaboration format and this will not change when going forward. The conversation that was started with Thriving Streets in Deurne was interrupted by the corona pandemic, but also by changes in the team due to the varying staffing levels. Since spring 2022, a new (partly overlapping) team has been working towards the redevelopment of the district centre, with accessible workshops showing citizens what their street could look like in the future. The team took a step back in the process after setting a more definitive scope for the temporary layout.

Building a good conversation and report with the local residents and local businesses is very time consuming and intensive. However, it is part of our society ideals and we believe it will pay off in the long run.

Despite being considered as a failure in the traditional sense, it still facilitated an intense dialogue that would not have taken place otherwise and taught important lessons about the real needs and expectations of the residents and traders.

It was a new starting point for more constructive dialogue about the future of the neighbourhood. The team went back to work with the – sometimes difficult – experiences from the temporary intervention. The focus of the designers shifted more to:

• trafficsafe solutions for cyclists
• space for bicycle parking
• decreasing the amount of impervious surface and adding vegetation in the fight against flooding
• the street as part of a 'green and pleasant route' rather than wanting to create as much residential space as possible
• the development of a mobility hub

The greening of the street remained a somewhat underexposed theme despite the many efforts that have been made in Antwerp in recent years with regard to this theme, including the design of 'garden streets'. Recent discussions with the neighbourhood in Deurne show that these initiatives provide important inspiration.

Because we learned that many residents and traders are little or not aware of the existing mobility sharing systems in Antwerp and in their neighbourhood, we plan to inform them extensively. We organise a very informative evening in September 2022, a communication event in the format of a mobility safari. Participants can test out different modes of transport like shared electric scooters, or will receive help installing relevant mobility applications on their smartphone. The lessons we draw from this communication experiment can also be used in other neighbourhoods with a similar demographic profile (with a large proportion of older people and a growing young and diverse population).

Part of the mobility approach in Antwerp is the expansion of the number of zones where cars are not allowed to go faster than 30 km per hour. Significant steps have already been taken: the number of zones 30 has been expanded to almost all residential areas and the total area where this speed limit applies has increased from 16 to 43 percent.

The evolution of mobility over the past ten years can teach the government a lot about how Antwerp should prepare for the future. For example, shared mobility seems to have acquired an important place. Commercial car sharing started here in 2005 and has been booming, especially since 2017, with a peak in 2019. A higher supply of shared cars was invariably followed by a higher number of users.

Shared bicycles have been playing a role in Antwerp's mobility offer since 2011. In 2020, 4 million journeys were made with Velo bicycles. 30,000 rides were made a year earlier on a Blue-bike. Since 2018, residents of Antwerp and visitors can take shared scooters and electric shared scooters, and since 2022 electric shared bicycles and shared cargo bikes.

The next step in transforming the district centre in Deurne is to develop a real mobility hub on the site, integrated in the definitive redevelopment of the Frank Craeybeckxlaan, together with a qualitative reconstruction of the street. This will be an important final element of the process and experiment that we have entered into with 'Thriving Streets'.