For more than a century, 24 hectares of Antwerp-Noord belonged to the trains. The Belgian railways parked rolling stock there, repaired locomotives and trained their staff, and the yard sat like a wall between three districts, Dam, Stuivenberg and the Seefhoek. In 2001 the railway left. Park Spoor Noord, 18 hectares of it, opened in two halves in 2008 and 2009, and more than 30,000 people live within 800 metres of it.

The numbers explain the urgency. A survey of residents in 1999 found that only one home in eight in the surrounding streets had any outdoor space at all. The neighbourhoods were dense, the yard filled the space between them, and the city’s answer was to turn most of it into grass.

From marsh to marshalling yard

Before the railway the land was the Schijnvallei, a marshy valley that cut the Dam district off from the rest of Antwerp, with a fort and a lunette guarding the city on the site. The yard first appears on the Antwerp map around 1873, the year the Dam station was built. The 1998 regional zoning plan marked the yard for urban development. On 16 April 2001 the city launched the Spoor Noord project, a week later it founded a municipal company, Antwerpen Nieuw Noord, to run it, and on 3 December 2001 the city, the railway company NMBS and its property arm Euro-Immo-Star signed the deal.

The terms were simple. The western 6 hectares, the Kop Spoor Noord, went to the railway for development, with rights to build 192,000 square metres; high-rise buildings were chosen so that as little ground as possible would be built on. The other 18 hectares became the park.

Villages and metropolis

The international design competition opened on 6 May 2002. Twenty-six firms applied and five were shortlisted, and on 1 September 2002 about 200 residents spent a day drawing their own plans, which went to the designers. Early in 2003 the jury picked Villages and Metropolis, by the Italian studio of Bernardo Secchi and Paola Viganò, working with the Dutch firm of Pieter Kromwijk and the Belgian firms Iris Consulting and Meertens en Steffens. The same Italian studio later drew the master plan for Nieuw Zuid, the city’s new district on the southern edge.

The design is plain on purpose. It plants trees rather than bushes, a choice the designers made for safety and for the maintenance bill. All the trees are native species raised in the city’s own tree nursery. The cycle paths run side by side like tracks. Construction of the western half began on 1 March 2006, and it opened on 25 May 2008; the eastern half followed on 13 and 14 June 2009. The money came largely from Europe: €14 million in Objective 2 regional funding, split equally between the EU, Flanders and the city, plus €1.2 million from the federal programme for large cities.

What is in it

The first thing to open, in November 2007, was the skate bowl, with a BMX track and a full-pipe, designed and built by the contractor Verbruggen with the skatepark specialists Team Pain. The rest is a list of things that need space and not much else: a basketball court, a pétanque lane, ping-pong tables, a large lawn for frisbee and badminton, fountains with a summer bar beside them, and, when the park opened, three small playgrounds for toddlers, a sand playground and two water playgrounds, with a rope playground for children aged 6 to 16 to follow. When the western half opened in 2008, a temporary restaurant called Cargo moved into one of the old railway shelters.

The best decision in the park is the public barbecues. They were installed because most of the people who live around it have no garden or terrace of their own, and they turn a lawn into somewhere to spend an evening: you bring the meat or the fish and the charcoal, the city supplies the grill. Koen Derkinderen of AG Stadsplanning, the city’s planning company, summed up the brief in one line: the project created “a garden for the residents and a park for the city”. The barbecues are the garden part.

The railway buildings

Three railway buildings were kept, and two protected water towers were restored by the architects Heylen en Verbeeck. The largest survivor is the WDT shed, built in 1925 as the workshop for diesel locomotives, the Werkplaats voor Diesel Tractie. Verdickt en Verdickt won the competition to convert it in February 2007, against Abalos & Herreros and Atelier Kempe Thill among others, with a construction budget of €5.8 million. It was finished in September 2011: the main hall for events and catering, the middle shed as a neighbourhood sports centre, offices and logistics space in the outbuildings, and a new sports hall for the Hogeschool Antwerpen and the city’s BuurtSport. One of the hangars covers more than 5,500 square metres, one of the largest roofed spaces in Antwerp.

The park also fixed a route. A cycle and footbridge with a free span of about 60 metres, the Parkbrug, carries the path over the Leien at Noorderplaats and on to the Eilandje docks and the MAS, the city museum on the water; its construction budget was €1.63 million. On the other side the paths lead into the Seefhoek, one of the three districts the yard used to divide.

The neighbours noticed. Renovation permits in the surrounding streets rose from 11 in 2000 to 47 in 2009, and the project won the Prijs Bouwheer in September 2009 and the Thuis in de Stad prize in January 2010.

The trains moved north in 2001. The cycle paths still run in parallel, in case they come back.