During the 2021–2022 academic year, the Bachelor’s students in Architectural Design at Ghent University worked on the redevelopment of a typical Flemish urban housing block. The starting point was a site in Aalst, on the right bank of the River Dender, just outside the city ring road. The brief was to design a variety of housing schemes within the pentagonal block formed by Binnenstraat, Groenstraat, Sint-Vincentiusstraat and Moorselbaan.

Along these streets, the current development consists of a succession of relatively small single-family homes. The inner area is occupied by a few sheds, garages and alleys. The design exercise did not start from a tabula rasa, but asked the students to engage with the existing context.