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Information

Summary

The outcome of this project is a future scenario of four phases, which explore how Landgoed De Grote Beek can transform as a sustainable, healing environment. This is, of course, also the question, which the client - GGz Eindhoven - posed. Landgoed De Grote Beek is the location of the headquarters of GGz Eindhoven. It is a park of 125 hA, location in the north of Eindhoven. The site has been devoted to mental health since 1918, and this long history and development are visible in both the architecture and landscape. In 1993, the vast majority of fences around the site were removed, marking a new era of mental health based on social integration, but also opening new vulnerabilities.

Sustainability has been on public agendas for decades, and certainly with more vigour than mental health. Yet, it must be clear that there is a shared urgency to them, as delaying action in both only exacerbates the systemic consequences. In this sense GGz Eindhoven, as one of the largest mental health institutions in the Netherlands recognises its responsibility in both areas. In 2014, GGz Eindhoven was awarded a Gold Planetree Certificate, which celebrates and validates peo­ple-centred health organisations. In 2020, GGz Eindhoven was awarded a bronze certificate by the Mileu Platform Zorgsector, an association of health sector organisations with the ambition to implement the public sustainability agenda in the healthcare in the Netherlands.

It is in this context that this project operates and responds to the ambition to develop Landgoed De Grote Beek as a sustainable, healing environment, which accommodates a community of mental resilience (kracht), and acts as the Central Park (the one of New York) of Eindhoven. This project is a design research, based on three parts: understanding, framing and speculating.

Understanding has focused on two dimen­sions - the local and the conceptual. The local focuses on the place, its landscape, community and the institution and their interrelations have been mapped - resulting in the Atlas of De Grote Beek. These three were selected as a way of accessing the site and understanding the important systems and actors with regard to the four ambitions. The maps are produced by a variety of means, ranging form simply retracing existing maps in a selective way, to mapping out data from spreadsheets provided by the staff of GGz Eindhoven, to inter­viewing staff and clients about their knowledge and experiences of the place. In this way, the maps gave equal importance to a wide range of narra­tives that live in De Grote Beek. Some of these narratives appear occasionally and in the dark, while others are loudly manifested. But all of them were equally important in creating an independent and diverse understanding of what the place is like at the moment.

Next to this, it was necessary to build an understanding of the potential contents of the ambition of GGz Eindhoven. This included studying the Planetree criteria and selecting a set of them that can be addressed at the scale of the landscape. It also included studying the sustainability requirements of medical facilities in the Netherlands, and of course understanding which of these are already in process of being achieved, and more importantly which of these are really to be addressed by means of the knowledge available to an architect, and not an economist or a physicist.

Framing, has focused on translating this information into avenues of action towards the ambition. The ambition as such has four aspects, each of them operates at a different level: the (technical) system, the organisation, the sense of community, and the ecology of the place. Poten­tially each sub ambition can and is being realised with a separate plan of action. Yet one of the findings of the analysis is that the site is strongly fragmented in its operations and in its physical experience. So it was evident that the scenarios should not further enforce the fragmentation, by layering topics and creating separate plans of action. Instead the question was how would the site look like if each of these sub-ambitions became the structuring element and was defining the approach towards the spatial transformation. To ensure the comparability of the scenarios, a grid scheme was created, the axis defined type of interventions (infrastructural or organisational) and the abscissa defined the degree of control the institution would have over the process. This resulted in 4 alternative scenarios, but comparable scenarios that showed a range of ways that the ambitions can be translated to spatial develop­ment principles.

The scenario, which gives highest priority to the ambition of the healing environment was selected to be developed in further detail. In that scenario the backbone of the site was to be developed as a path which loops though the terrain and connects the fragments. Further on, the existing qualities and conditions would be strengthened and develop ed along a range of themes which are part of the healing process - such as meaningful work, care, access to nature, self-expression, socialisation and self-care. The concept of healing took central stage, not only in the path, which resembles the journey of healing and not only in the thematic areas. In specific, healing is a process, so it was important to think of time as a key ingredient in the project. Naturally, the criteria of Planetree are rather open to inter­pretation, as they should be because every site has its peculiarities which need to be nurtured. But this openness in the case of this project creates a second opportunity - that of time. The elaborated design of the chosen scenario shows by what means could these criteria be fulfilled in a matter of weeks, months, years and decades.

The last thing left to do is to explain the structure and format of this book. The chapter called Future Scenarios for De Grote Beek, explains the process and choices made along the way in order to create this project. The other chapters contain the actual results of the project. The chapter called Atlas contains all the maps, the reflection on their meaning and the scenario case studies. The chapter called Four pathways describes the alternative strategies to achieving the ambitions of GGz Eindhoven. And finally, the chapter on the other side of the book, which is called Playbook for healing environments elabo­rates in practical terms how De Grote Beek can transform as a sustainable healing environment.

Funded by GGzEindhoven