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Vincent Leonard Matzmorr: Unlocking Civic Potential in Ostend (BE): The Europacentrum Case

On Coasting
In current multidisciplinary research on coastal regions of the world, the binary understanding between land and sea has gradually been replaced with the notion of a process: Coasting.

“Coasting is something, which happens; it is mobile and fluid, responding to changing conditions and balances. Instead of understanding it as a battle for territory between land and sea, coasting is invitational, cooperative and discursive”

‚To coast’ refers to the processes involved in the perception and production of this dynamic landscape. Those processes overlap disciplines such as marine biology, oceanography, ecology, architecture, industry and education. Understanding coasting socially as a common and spatially as a threshold reaching from‚ in land‘ till‚ at sea‘ helps to tackle the urgent challenges resulting from human life as the dominant geomorphological agent changing this planet.

The aim of this dissertation is to explore the concept of coasting as a starting point for an architectural discourse on reimagining the post- war modernist high-rise ‚the Europacentrum‘ in Ostend. The residential tower from 1969 exemplifies one of the most destructive times of the anthropocene and serves as focal point in a series of epistemic artefacts challenging to tune such a landmark in with its civic and natural environment.

Unlocking Civic Potential in Ostend‘ asks what the Europacentrum can do for the city. It is not about programming, it is about enabling programming through public practices in qualitative space. Unlocking Civic Potential in Ostend as a catalogue of performative practices places  knowledge on the edifice in to a coherent whole and aspires to initiate a new perception of an estranged landmark.

Unlocking Civic Potential