Park Spoor Noord

The park was conceived as ‘a garden for the neighbourhood, a park for the city’ — working with Secchi and Viganò’s larger notion of Antwerp as both a series of villages and a metropolis, rephrasing an ageold planning discourse adagio. It had to connect the housing quarters of Dam, Stuivenberg and Seefhoek that were cut-off from one another by the railway site. These disadvantaged neighbourhoods were also largely cutoff from the city. Therefore, as Secchi and Viganò express it, the challenge was to reconfigure the area from ‘fold’ to ‘tissue’, ‘fissure’ to ‘backbone’ and from ‘barrier’ to ‘lever’.