The first version in 2015 of the city as a strategy was made for Uitwijken during the first Bruges Triennial.
The city in motion, the city as a project, the city as a strategy,
the city malleable between its citizens’ fingers.
City models are used to think about the city, about its past, present and future.
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During Uitwijken,, artist Jonas Vansteenkiste invites the residents of various Bruges neighbourhoods to gather around the black strategy tables to think about their surroundings and how they can give shape to these.
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Discussions, wishes and conversations are carried out around the tables and given shape.
Each of the tables represents a place where the Uitwijken culture caravan has visited,
and together they form the Bruges territory.
“The city as a strategy” is an installation piece that things about the city from the residents’ perspective.
The clay, which symbolises the city’s malleability, and as long as it is mixed with water, passers-by can give shape to the city.
The result of this artwork that grew during the Uitwijken event and the public opening of the triennial can be seen on the grass square behind the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk.
This piece is a community art project.
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in 2024 Vansteenkiste made a more open adaptation of the work.
Vansteenkiste elaborates on the tension between the city model as a policy object for politics and its democratic malleable model.
Where dreams and desires above all take shape independently of objectives.
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Jonas Vansteenkiste – The City as a Strategy (2015–2024)
A cartography of collective imagination, social transformation, and spatial power
In The City as a Strategy, Jonas Vansteenkiste poses a fundamental question: how do we shape the city — and who has the right to do so? This multilayered installation challenges the notion of the city as a fixed or purely technical entity. Instead, it approaches the urban environment as a dynamic space of imagination, memory, conflict, and collective agency. The work consists of a series of black strategy tables, where clay is offered to participants — children, locals, passers-by — as a material for shaping their vision of the city. Around these tables, the city is not merely discussed, but literally formed, kneaded, altered, and reimagined.
The use of maquette-like table setups is anything but neutral. In many institutional contexts, architectural models function as policy instruments — scale representations of urban futures devised from above, used for presentation and persuasion. The city model becomes a tool of control, a visualization of decisions made elsewhere. Vansteenkiste subverts this paradigm. His models are not blueprints but open-ended situations. They are not visualizations of a pre-scripted future but propositions in progress — temporary, fragile, and always subject to revision.
The installation is part of a wider artistic and theoretical tradition in which the city is not approached as mere infrastructure but as a social and affective fabric. It echoes Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon (1956–74), where the city becomes a playground for the Homo Ludens — the playing human who reshapes space through spontaneity rather than necessity. Perhaps more fundamentally, Vansteenkiste's work resonates with the legacy of the Situationist International, who in the 1950s and ’60s reconceived the city through the lens of psychogeography. Thinkers like Guy Debord critiqued the functionalist logic of modernist urban planning and called for a subjective, sensorial engagement with space. Through dérives — unstructured urban driftings — they sought to reclaim the city as a terrain of emotion, desire, and encounter. Vansteenkiste revives these ideas in a participatory and materially grounded practice where the city unfolds through the actions of many.
A poignant example of the poetic and narrative openness of The City as a Strategy unfolded at one of the tables, where a young child sculpted a large turtle from clay. The creature stood high on four legs — a hybrid form, somewhere between mythical animal, mechanical construct, and dream-figure. That night, the sculpture began to collapse under its own weight, softened by temperature, moisture, and gravity. The next day, a different child approached the clay form, no longer seeing a turtle, but instead recognizing a meteorite — an object from another world, mysterious and full of potential. On the following day, yet another child reinterpreted the now reshaped object as a church, adding towers and arches. What had begun as an animal became a cosmic relic and then a place of gathering. Each participant appropriated the clay form anew, overlaying it with meaning, and rewriting its identity through their own imagination.
This anecdote captures the essence of Vansteenkiste's approach. It shows how urban space emerges from the interplay of material, imagination, and shared use. These clay sculptures are not fixed objects but mutable processes of meaning-making. Nothing is destroyed; everything is transformed. The clay here becomes more than a material — it is memory, projection surface, and social bond.
In the 2024 iteration of the work, the tension embedded in the concept of the city model becomes more explicitly articulated. Vansteenkiste contrasts the city as an object of democratic shaping with the city as a political and economic project. He interrogates the thin line between participatory imagination and symbolic involvement without real power. Where does collective authorship end and top-down appropriation begin? How can a model give space to desires without becoming co-opted by policy goals?
The City as a Strategy ultimately functions as a cartography of possibilities — not to describe the city as it is, but to envision it as it could be. The work invites a collective exercise in spatial imagination, where every participant becomes an urban planner, a dreamer, a cartographer. It does not oppose imagination to reality, but rather asserts that imagination is an essential component of how cities come into being. In that sense, Vansteenkiste's installation is both a social experiment and an aesthetic site: a space where the future becomes tangible — in clay, in dialogue, and in shared longing.
