Ville+Sambre+Ville: a riverside park to reconnect the urban archipelago

This paper explains a strategy for territorial regeneration developed for the city of Sambreville, in Belgium. As a former village of the Wallonia industrial sillon, the city of Sambreville, during last century, was designed and managed in order to increase industrial production, the Sambre River represented the main infrastructure for the distribution of raw materials and final products. Later, the social and economical structures changed while morphological and physical ones were unvarying. The project Sambre+Ville+Sambre turns the river into public space at a provincial scale, transforming it into a territorial backbone that reorganizes all the different elements composing this archipelago. The strategy, trough the design of a riverside park, builds transversal connections based on the penetration of public spaces from the river to the housing complex. The project crosses all different scales of territorial design: from macro to micro; public spaces are interpreted as the link that interconnects all the different territorial elements.