The thesis investigates how the persistent socio-economic problems of the postindustrial territory and inhabitants of Charleroi can be challenged by using the landscape as the overhauling instrument. Through mapping and re-interpretation, the new landscape figures are ‘found’ and subsequently re-imagined providing thus a new-spatial frame to structure present and future urbanity.
To understand the dwelling of this landscape by humans, the thesis uses the concept of ‘Ecological Floors’/ ‘Ecological complementarity’ as studied by John V. Murra et al in the book “Anthropological history of Andean Polities”. It also borrows and inspires from the concept of the city in a city/ the Berlin Archipelago 1977 by Oswald Mathias Ungers, Rem Koolhaas et al. The project site chosen for a designed intervention is a former coal mine that was flattened to build social housing in the 1970s.