Brussels Urban Landscape Biennial 2018: Rising Waters — Shaping Our Gardens, Streets And Urban Valleys

Climate change causes an important increase of rainfall rates and more particularly of intense rain events, posing a significant threat to coastal regions and small islands across the surface of our planet. And yet, even in urban areas farther away from these coastal regions, increased precipitations and urban spread also cause a problematic of flood of entire city areas, which occurs more often than before.

The second edition of the Brussels Urban Landscape Biennial (BULB) reviews the increasingly worrying issue of flooding in urban areas. How to manage the complex evacuation of rainwater in an integrated manner? Can landscape architecture provide an answer to such challenges and how? What are the limits of the current way of addressing this question?

Through workshops, learning by doing activities, an exhibition, a day of symposium and curated walks, the BULB event, which spans two months, tries to sensitize the broad public to the importance of water and its related cycles in the urban landscape. Rather than considering this element as a threat, BULB sees it as a vital and structuring element of this shaped landscape.

The exhibition of the Brussels Urban Landscape Biennial (BULB) is held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, from September 21 until November 11, 2018.

Invited architects & landscape architects: Architecture Workroom Brussels, Bureau Bas Smets, JNC International, Latitude Platform, Taktyk
Invited artists: Christian Barani, Andrea Caretto & Raffaella Spagna, Gauthier Oushoorn, Superflex
Curatorial team: Joachim Declerck, assisted by Alice Haddad (AWB) and Francelle Cane (BOZAR)

September 20, 8–9pm
Georges Descombes’ presentation is the keynote lecture to the second edition of the Brussels Urban Landscape Biennial (BULB).
The opportunity here is to highlight a singular culture and an operational landscape and territorial methodology, including questioning the morphological memory of a fragment of territory, the meaning of a place and finally, the use of water, as an allusion to a past device.

September 21, 8:30am–5pm
BOZAR and the Brussels Federation of Urbanism (FBU-BFS) invite you to take part in a one-day symposium. During talks, several key European figures will focus on the issue of the landscape. They will evoke and examine different projects, practices or research going on outside Brussels. Members of the Belgian university research community will then put the different subjects back in the context of the Brussels region by way of workshops and discussions involving moderators and lecturers.
Lecturers: Eva Pfannes, Sybrand Tjallingii and Giambatista Zaccariotto

September 22, 9am–5pm
A few Brussels personalities have been invited to choose a series of places in the region of Brussels-Capital that are significant in their eyes and which reflect the main theme of the biennial: water. Once they have been connected, these places will trace a route through the region. Discover this event during a day of curated walks, each led by one of the personalities invited.
Liquid narratives through the city with: Kristiaan Borret, Antoine Espinasseau, Serge Kempeneers, Jacques and Christophe Mercier & others TBA.

September 22-23
Previously known as “Jardins en Fête,” the new “Garden Tales” event invites people to discover 18 unexpected gardens in the Brussels region. A discovery of the use of water in all the variety of its forms initiated by CIVA.