“Working at the ring road” is a project that redesigns the Brussels Ring Road. As the ring road crosses several Natura 2000 areas like the Haller forest, Laarbeek forest and Sonian forest, and currently it’s literally a barrier for migrating fauna and flora in an already densely populated area.
The objective of the program around the Brussels Ring Road is to improve public transport (high speed bus and tramway), stimulate the modal shift (bicycle highway) and redesign the road itself (solving infrastructure and mobility issues) whilst also fixing the ecological problems, by ameliorating the surroundings for both society and nature.
For the latter, we have two fundamental ecological goals:
1) Solving ecological barriers permanently in the exploitation phase. Fauna should be able to migrate alongside the ring road towards and from the Natura 2000 and other green-blue areas, but also in and out of the European capital. Hence, we made an ecoconnectivity map of the whole of the Northern region around the Brussels Ring Road.
2) Minimizing the impact on existing populations and habitats in the construction phase by inventing/creating the minimum disruption plan ecology. This plan is a nature based approach synchronized with the project phases to evacuate plants and animals out of the working zones and maintain species as much as possible permanently in situ.

Both goals are an absolute novelty in Belgium. During IENE 2018, we already presented the idea of the ecoconnectivity map. This edition is a moment of reflection of this map and to explain what we’ve learned so far.