OASE117

Is the village still relevant as a model in times of general urbanisation? The village has remained underexposed in the historiography of architecture and urbanism. This is also true of the contemporary architecture debate, which is still dominated by the avant-garde, urbanity, institutional types of building and the reuse of the city. Recently, however, more attention has been paid to the village, partly due to the demand for spatial densification, climate challenges and biodiversity. There is a need for a qualitative approach to village densification in the Netherlands and Belgium, but also a growing interest in preserving and restoring the identity of villages and landscapes.

OASE 117 contributes to the debate on the architecture and urbanism of villages, examining them not as the antithesis of modernity, but as its complex product. Eight essays analyse images, inventories, idealisations and transformations of villages within the changing political-social contexts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.