On a crisp winter morning, I meander through a part of the Kalkense Meersen nature reserve, near the Schellebelle ferry. A solitary jogger follows the towpath. High in the air, a crow carves its way through the icy silence with its piercing cry. For some reason, my eye is drawn to a tree in a meadow. It's not an extraordinary tree, small in stature, but its branches majestically spread out into the grey winter sky. In the background, a bush and a barn respectfully keep their distance, as if not to disturb the view.
A winding, discarded arm of the river Scheldt leads me to an expansive plain. Here, I am overcome by a strange kind of emotion. I don’t have a name for it right away, but it’s about that vista, that sudden feeling of space. Relief! That’s what it is. As if a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.
Glancing around in this vast expanse of flat land, it suddenly strikes me that not a single house or factory building is in sight. An illusion, of course. They are there, undoubtedly, deeply hidden in the morning fog. And yet, here lies the cause of that sudden feeling of lightness. Enveloped in mist,I perceive only the natural world around me, and I realize, this is quite remarkable.
I stop before another tree, a dark silhouette along the water’s edge. Two crows in the crown lazily study the landscape.
How long has it been, I wonder, since I last saw a horizon in Flanders that wasn’t marred by human intervention? I can’t remember. Flanders is overly parceled. Its open space clogged with reddish-brown fermettes and semi-detached houses, the dream homes of a people born with a brick in their stomach. Where once you might accidentally step in a cow pat, now you dance around flat chihuahua droppings on the asphalt.
Our country is silted up. Of course, I’ve known this for a while. The newspapers are full of it. Years following the announcement of the Concrete Stop *, which morphed into a 'Concrete Shift', the equivalent of seven football fields of land still vanishes beneath concrete daily. A staggering number. That’s something I say to my wife over the morning paper. Staggering. “Yes, yes,” she replies.
But I don’t lose sleep over it.
Until this morning, in the middle of that field. For the first time, the realization hits me: uninterrupted open space has become a rarity in Flanders.
I ponder whether they still exist: the untouched landscapes, the regions free from ribbon development, the expansive fields of days gone by.
Text and photo: Geert Huysman
* The reference to the Concrete Stop and subsequent shift involves a policy decision by the Flemish government aimed at curbing urban sprawl and the indiscriminate concreting of the landscape. Initially, the Concrete Stop was intended to halt the loss of open space by restricting new construction on undeveloped land to protect natural and agricultural areas. However, as policy and implementation challenges arose, the initiative evolved into a "shift", focusing more on sustainable development, revitalization of existing buildings, and densification of urban areas.