“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” Jane Jacobs

The way our environment is shaped, impacts our daily lives; how we live, work, move, meet, grow up, and so on. But citizens who are impacted the most, are not always involved in the design and (re-)organisation of their environment. Cities are not designed by its users. Local governments, urban designers and planners and architects shouldn’t allow for citizens to participate in the processes that shape their environment only because they need their ‘support’, but because they need their knowledge and ownership. What kind of processes, frameworks and tools do we need for an open dialogue between all users and stakeholders?

The Antwerp ‘Stadswaag’ is a hidden square with a name that refers to the vanished 16th Century building where goods going in and out the city where being ‘weighed’ (waag). In the 20th Century, from the fifties until the eighties, the square was one of the most important places for jazz, nightlife, activism, and the art scene. It is not a coincidence that the square is located next to – and had a strong relation with - the Antwerp Academy for Fine Arts for the past 160 years. But despite the historical relation between the Academy and the square, today the interaction is lost. The gate of the Academy on the Stadswaag, opening up the campus to the North area of the city has been closed for the past 40 years.

In the next years (2022-24) the Stadswaag square will be renewed, and the city of Antwerp assigned the Academy of Fine Arts and the Expanding Academy to design the art integration of the square, usually leading to a conventional bronze statue. But how can we go beyond that old idea of a single artist creating a statue? How can we go into dialogue with the neighborhood and all of its users to collectively think about public space and the role of art in it?

Studio Stadswaag is a cooperation between the City of Antwerp, the teachers and students of InSitu at Academy of Fine Arts, and the architecture teachers and students from the University of Antwerp, and Stadsform, that is coordinated by the Expanding Academy and Endeavour, represented by Nico Dockx and Maarten Desmet.

The ambition of Studio Stadswaag is to facilitate and inspire the dialogue between all stakeholders and dynamics around the Stadswaag square and together imagine and cocreate new relations between the square and its users, the academy, its history, and society in general. How can we cocreate a collective work of art that is not a timeless object but a dynamic process and doesn’t stand alone, but is intervention in a web of relations?