Where the pavement ends. Can Ghent become a truly rewilded city?

Urbanisation and soil sealing go inevitably hand in hand? Not necessarily.

“Ghent is suffering from heat stress every summer, and with current climate change scenarios, we need a systematic change in soil sealing to ensure liveability for our inhabitants in the future,” says Linde Vertriest, climate change adaption officer of the City of Ghent and the mastermind behind REWILD during my first visit in March 2025. It’s an ambition that breaks with the paradigm that urban growth must always come at the cost of more concrete, tarmac and asphalt. Currently, 38% of the surface of Ghent is sealed, in some neighbourhoods, these numbers reach even 80%, making neighbourhoods more vulnerable to heat island effects and other effects on the quality of life.

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^{REWILD's core-team – from left to right: Anika Depraetere (Ho Ghent); Iris Lauwaert (City of Ghent, Green Service); Jan Van Cauwenberge (City of Ghent, financial officer); Ellen Pecceu (City of Ghent; REWILD project manager), Annelies Sevenant (Ghent Environmental Front), Linde Vertriest (City of Ghent, climate change adaptation officer), Line Ostyn (City of Ghent, funding officer), Anton Christiaens (Breekijzer). Photo by Johannes Riegler.}

In 2024, Ghent counted 270,000 residents, and projections suggest this will rise to 300,000 by 2040, putting even more pressure on the city’s urban fabric. At the same time, the city is characterised by its social and cultural superdiversity [1]: The city is home to residents from 160 different nations, representing a diverse range of socio-economic backgrounds. At the same time, it is a university city attracting around 84,000 students. For that reason, any intervention in the city that includes urban rewilding and greening has to be carefully orchestrated to avoid negative social and socio-economic consequences.

At the heart of the project lies the city’s green plan, which aims that every resident of the city should have access to...

... urban green space within 150m of their doorstep
... a neighbourhood park of at least 1ha within 400 meters of their doorstep
... a green of at least 100ha within 5km

While meeting the different partners of REWILD, Anika Depraetere, from eCO-CITY at Hogeschool Ghent, and Anton Christiaens from the NGO Breekijzer, who work on engaging local communities, add: “Success isn’t just about green space metrics—it’s about how people feel when they walk through their neighbourhoods.” As I will later find out, this quote captured the spirit of REWILD in a nutshell: Achieving climate resilience by weaving together innovative urban rewilding strategies deeply rooted (pun intended) in local urban communities.

REWILD in action: Turning concrete into connected nature

“Rewilding isn’t something you just implement like a product. It’s a long-term process, something you stay with. As a city administration, we need to merge very different activities and work together with ten different city services from four departments,” Linde Vertriest reflects when asked whether she sees a final ‘rewildened’ state of Ghent. REWILD brings together activities which are targeted to the City of Ghent’s long-term ambitions: Increase biodiversity and resilience to climate risks, identify and scale-up REWILDed designs and approaches, develop innovative funding methods and improve the health and wellbeing of the people living in Ghent while keeping the price tag of interventions low and thus, reducing the impact on city finances. Combining key activities into one innovative project is what makes REWILD so transformative for the City of Ghent. What are these activities?

Digging into policy barriers with evidence: Before everyone takes to the shovel to break up the concrete, there needs to be a strategy in place. REWILD will gather scientifically backed data and make it accessible to policymakers and residents in a Geographic Information System (GIS; a system designed to capture, store, analyse, manage, and visualise spatial or geographic data). This GIS will serve as the basis for ‘urban growth without net land take’ actions by identifying and prioritising locations for desealing activities and monitoring the progress of rewilding the city.

Shifting from isolated greening gestures to systematic, city-wide change also requires having a critical look at what is hindering the process: what are the policies and practices potentially working against the ambitions? What are the policy frameworks that still promote and justify soil sealing? At the same time, what are the barriers and drivers of soil desealing? What is needed to make rewilding a default, not a debate?

Where Ghent gets its hands dirty -  Rewilding public spaces: Car-centred streets, paved schoolyards and an industrial brown field: Ghent will experiment with different pilot projects, planting seeds for greener neighbourhoods in socio-economically challenged areas. In Ledeberg and the surroundings of Ottergemsesteenweg, several climate-resilient street renovations will convert 20% of sealed surfaces into urban greenery.

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^{Vlierstraat in March 2025 - one of the streets to be REWILDed. Photo by Johannes Riegler.}

A climate-resilient neighbourhood park will be transforming a 1.2-hectare brownfield in Sluizeken-Tolhuis-Ham. The site will also serve as a living lab to test soil desealing techniques, vegetation types, and ecosystem services, aiming to develop a replicable and cost-effective model for urban rewilding.

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^{This former industrial site will be turned into a REWILDened park. Photo: Johannes Riegler.}

Two sealed school playgrounds - The yards of De Spiegel and De Kleurdoos schools will be transformed into green, desealed spaces offering climate, health, and educational benefits. These pilot projects aim to engage local communities in broader discussions on rewilding, while testing socially just and impactful approaches that can be compared and replicated citywide.

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^{The schoolyard of Jenaplanschool De Kleurdoos will be REWILDed in the next years. Photo by Johannes Riegler.}

Taken together, each of these experiments will lead the way to meet the no-land take ambitions as replicable models for future street designs, school upgrades and park developments. Rewilding is about experimenting in the city, learn and letting change take root.

Rewilding the private 75%: In a city where roughly 75% of the paved surfaces are located on private land, making a real dent in the concrete requires looking beyond the public spaces. REWILD will focus on mobilising the owners and renters of the private land and buildings to join the ambitions: from local residents to small businesses and social enterprises are invited to explore and co-create what it takes to turn sealed ground into green spaces.

The Rewilding Brigade, inspired by Ghent’s earlier vertical garden team, will help with some of the physical work: removing tiles, planting and installing climbing structures. REWILD will test what’s possible (and what’s not) when the city moves beyond the public spaces and into the courtyards and front gardens that make up the fabric of everyday life.

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^{Small vertical and pocket gardens in front of buildings can make a big difference in densely populated urban areas. Photo: Johannes Riegler.}

Putting money where the wild grasses grow: Innovative policies for rewilding urban areas are more than breaking up asphalt and planting some trees; it is about rethinking how urban green spaces can be funded. In times of tight public budgets, this is a concern for local public administrations across Europe, and the City of Ghent could show them the way how it is done. REWILD will identify how long-term, reliable financing for urban nature can be secured while unintended legal, spatial and social consequences are kept to a minimum. One of the most pressing questions the team will need to address over the next years is how to build long-term, systemic funding models that do not inadvertently fuel gentrification, reinforce inequality, or run into legal bottlenecks while ensuring private investments contribute to the ambition. This means looking beyond the EUI funding and working towards models that embed rewilding into the city's long-term developments and investments. REWILD will experiment with new funding models, mobilising private capital and partnerships with enterprises: it’s not only testing what it takes to green the streets, but the budgets as well.

Green grassroots: How NGOs cultivate change

The City of Ghent brought two NGOs on board for REWILD. For good reasons: both of them have a vast experience of community engagement and mobilising residents to take action and be part of the journey to greener neighbourhoods.

Before heading out to explore current and future rewilding practices in Ghent during my first visit, Anton Christiaens gives me an insight into the work of the NGO Breekijzer, translated to crowbar in English. Breekijzer is an open knowledge and practice centre spreading the expertise with one mission: break up the tarmac, tiles and concrete that seal Flanders. Breekijzer is organising a regional contest in Flanders where municipalities compete with each other on how much soil is desealed. Anton and Breekijzer encourage people to take a shovel or another tool and start desealing themselves: “Anyone can do it—it's simple and fun. When we invite people to take a shovel and start working, we show it’s good for you, your health and contributes to the liveability of your place. The benefits for the environment come naturally once people get started. Picking up a shovel and starting to dig feels like a radical and empowering act.”, he points out.

In the afternoon, Annelies Sevenant from the NGO Ghent Environmental Front (GMF) joined us on a bike ride through the neighbourhoods where REWILD will make a difference. We started our tour with a visit to a courtyard where GMF is storing the seedlings for their work. The City of Ghent is working together with GMF to install little pocket gardens (Geveltuinen) throughout the streets all over Ghent. Over the years, thousands of these pocket gardens have been realised by taking away some tiles in front of buildings, filling up the space with soil and planting a seedling, leaving a visible mark on Ghent (even in March before the arrival of spring). “It is important to see desealing not only as an infrastructural improvement but as a social activity. If more people in a street are looking to install pocket gardens, they can contact us and we will organise a desealing street party. These micro-interventions trigger the imagination of the residents and show how a street can be rewilded,” Annelies Sevenant underlines. In the next years, GMF will form the Ghent Rewilding Brigade: A support offered to residents who are looking into rewilding their (front) gardens, removing pavement and bring back nature into the city.

By bringing Breekijzer and GMF into the project, the City of Ghent ensures that rewilding is not just about greener streets, but about a culture of co-creation where desealing becomes a neighbourhood affair rooted in everyday spaces.

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^{The Ghent Environmental Front knows what plants thrive under what conditions.}

Where the pavement ends: Ghent’s push for rewilding the city

Over the next 3.5 years, REWILD will reimagine what urban green and nature can be in a growing city. It is a complex effort involving many parts: At least ten different departments of the city’s public administration, each with their procedures and ways of working, knowledge centres, non-governmental organisations and more. As Linde Vertriest put it: “REWILD is working like an octopus with many independent tentacles contributing to one organism”. A beautiful analogy which could be explored further, especially in the context of rewilding cities [2].

Urban public space is scarce and tends to be highly contested: green space, parking, bike lanes, and other social needs are ‘competing’. REWILD needs to balance interests while being highly ambitious because the lifetime of the street layout after renovation is expected to be between 50-70 years. For that reason, every redesign is a long-term decision: the choices made today will shape the city for decades. In a densely populated and superdiverse city with a growing population, improving liveability and enhancing green spaces in disadvantaged neighbourhoods risks triggering unintended effects such as gentrification. For the REWILD team, being aware of and addressing these issues heads-on is of great importance for the success of the project.

With REWILD and its broader strategy of no-net land take, rewilding public spaces while mobilising private land and identifying financing models for urban greening and desealing, the City of Ghent’s approach and experience could offer useful lessons for many other European cities that face similar challenges.

Rooted in Ghent but growing across Europe

In Ghent, cracking up the pavement is not just about letting nature back into the city – it is an experiment to rethink European urban areas by radically connecting the built infrastructures with ecosystems. Through experiences and knowledge generated in REWILD, the City of Ghent will be able to contribute to a climate resilient form of urbanism on a European level: from the European Green Deal [3] and EU Climate Adaptation Strategy [4] to the EU Biodiversity [5] and Soil Strategy [6] for 2030, the Urban Agenda for the EU [7] (especially its partnerships on Sustainable Land Use and Climate Adaptation) and the New Leipzig Charter [8]: Ghent is connecting the dots - from neighbourhoods to European level.

How wild can a city really become?

It will be exciting to follow the efforts, challenges and achievements of REWILD in the next 3.5 years. The City of Ghent invites us to rethink how nature and city life can not only co-exist but become woven together towards a future where natural green spaces considerably shape the feel and look of a neighbourhood, adapting climate change and improving liveability and health for its residents (human and more-than-human: plants and animals). Over the next years, we will look at Ghent closely to find out how wild a city can really become.

To find out the answer to that question, make sure to check out future publications and episodes on REWILD’s website, Portico, the Urban Voices and Cities Reimagined Podcast.

Bibliography & Notes

[1] Geldof, D., & Vanhaeren, R. (n.d.). De stad van de 21ste eeuw is superdivers: over stedelijkheid en superdiversiteit. Kenniscentrum Vlaamse Steden. https://repository.uantwerpen.be/docman/irua/30862cmotoM44

[2] For more on the fascinating intelligence of octopuses and how their tentacles are actually little brains: Bridle, J. (2022). Ways of being: Animals, plants, machines: The search for a planetary intelligence. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[3] EC (n.d.). The European Green Deal. Retrieved from https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_en

[4] EC. (n.d.). EU Adaptation Strategy. Retrieved from https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/adaptation-climate-change/eu-adaptation-strategy_en

[5] EC. (n.d.). Biodiversity strategy for 2030. Retrieved from https://environment.ec.europa.eu/strategy/biodiversity-strategy-2030_en

[6] EC (n.d.). Soil Strategy for 2030. Retrieved from https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/soil-health/soil-strategy-2030_en

[7] EC. (n.d.). Urban Agenda for the EU. Retrieved from https://commission.europa.eu/eu-regional-and-urban-development/topics/cities-and-urban-development/urban-agenda-eu_en

[8] EC (2020). New Leipzig Charter: The transformative power of cities for the common good. Retrieved from https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/whats-new/newsroom/12-08-2020-new-leipzig-charter-the-transformative-power-of-cities-for-the-common-good_en

Title image: Belgian street artist Jamz Jamezon adds biodiversity to the Macharius neighbourhood, with a series of works inspired by animals and nature that can be found in the area. Photo by Johannes Riegler.