Retracing the old shepherd paths of Tilburg in search of a new public domain

• TU Delft core studio I 2016
• Location: Tilburg, Netherlands
• Mentor: T. Bouma
• Status: Selected to be exhibited in TU Delft’s Orange Hall in November 2016

Cities in today’s complex urban marketing processes are constantly competing so as to attract visitors, creative settlers or investors and to keep their inhabitants attached to their “home”. The historical urban cores display noteworthy characteristics in relation to this competition as it is their iconography which constitutes a strong symbolic  frame of public life. Tilburg is a city often accused of not evoking a distinct image, of not having such a characteristic historical urban core. The fact that Tilburg emerged from the progressive aggregation of small villages where there was no urban design on the level of the city as a whole is often seen as the basis for the idea that Tilburg is a fragmented city.

The main question this project addresses is which -still traceable- parts of the historical urban legacy of Tilburg (the so-called herdgangen) could function as a reference point for defining a homogeneous cityscape in Tilburg and thus, alleviate this impression of urban fragmentation. The purpose is to analyse the origins of the structure of those old shepherd paths, to review what developments have affected or modified their structure and to determine to what degree they could establish a new network of public nuclei.