De Borght park restoration

Working with what decades of low maintenance made

2024 - ongoing
Mechelen - BE
City of Mechelen

Area: 4ha
Program: Historical landscape park, ecological redesign
Team: Ossart & Maurière (lead)
Status: Built-ongoing

The park sits within Mechelen's urban fabric, carrying layers of landscape history across its topography, its planting, and its soil. Working with a site of this kind involves holding two imperatives in productive tension: the heritage of the existing spatial structure (its sequence, its mature trees, its relationship between open and enclosed) and the ecological potential of what the site has become in the meantime, including in zones that developed more freely throughout decades of low maintenance.

The working method begins with a slow and detailed reading: soil, vegetation & historical surveys, planting inventories, observation of how different parts of the park.

The emerging design strategy works through selective reinforcement rather than wholesale redesign: interventions allow ecological succession to continue where it is already producing spatial and biological value, infrastructure are upgraded, pockets of uses are introduced to frame the architectural, landscape and botanical heritage, in a productive dialogue.

Note : the pictures below are depicting the existing situation, more will come soon !