TE HUUR | Fosbury Architecture

Leeuwarden is a beautiful city which doesn’t need anything else than the definition of an approach able to combine the promotion of the city center and the involvement of the citizens into this process. Through a careful investigation of the current living condition, this project proposes a bottom-up strategy which, starting from the problems related to the depopulation process of the center, will be able to reactivate the urban core. Only reviving the center, the shops will have a market, the services will have users, the tourists a context to visit.

In a city which is shrinking there is definitely no need to built new dwellings. The vacancies are a resource to define new ways to inhabit and work. The models offered by the sharing economy clearly define an alternative and more resilient pattern for the requalification of these areas. The sharing of the space is a useful tool to create the condition for start-ups, co-workings, and other programs.

The peer-to-peer economies represent as well an instrument to tackle the need of new accommodation for tourists, during the year in which Leeuwarden will be the European Capital of Culture and in the following ones.

What we expect is, in the short term, the occupation of the vacant spaces through a wide catalogue of possible activities and in the long term the stabilization of this weak system trough the energies of the inhabitants which have decided to invest in this city.