IDEA Consult, at the centre of the Walloon transition

 The Walloon Government has mandated its financial instrument, SOGEPA, to negotiate, acquire and manage the restructuring of the former steel sites of the Walloon Industrial furrow. The Government has decided to start with the two most emblematic sites in order to generate a restructuring practice likely to be emulated: the Carsid site, in Charleroi, and the Chertal site, with a string of historic sites in Liège and Sclessin.

After an international competition, SOGEPA has appointed two urban planning and architecture offices. IDEA Consult is responsible for the development of the socio-economic programmes. The programmes need to be deployed on these sites in order to support the redeployment strategy for these territories. IDEA Consult will also take care of the first financial outlines of the income likely to be generated by these reconversions.

Two projects of this extent and complexity obviously require the involvement of all local actors. It is therefore essential that they are involved from the design phase.

This is IDEA Consult’s role in partnership with the spatial and technical expertise required for the redeployment of the site. In addition to the economic specialisation analysis tools, which are conventionally developed to define reconversions, our approach will enable us to jointly build an ambitious vision. This will serve to re-deploy the sites with an economic and industrial purpose, creating added value and jobs

The virtuous tension between the challenges of industrial transition, economic redeployment, ecological resilience and landscape and urban quality has rarely been so intense. IDEA Consult intends to make use of its capacities to identify and harness innovation in order to meet these challenges in a virtuous manner.