Seasonal Design and the challenge of designing in the lee

Abstract

I read on a blog of a Belgian green activist, writer and nephew Jan Mertens; “People have destabilised seasons and in that way have destablised the rhythm that can provide us with safety and comfort (...). We need seasons to make us feel at home in this broken world. The winter demands our trust, a ‘leap of faith’, asks to let the cold in, because soon spring will arrive. In spring you can feel the change, the new life. The summer should be the warm safe space that only can exist because the days become shorter. The summer has the other seasons in it, like we can not do without ebb and flow. But people have disturbed the seasons and destabilise with it the rhythm that can provide us with safety (Mertens, 2025)”. In urban planning processes - taking long periods of time, with often a large spatial scale and complexity - there have been many discussions on the fact that design processes can not be too rigid and linear, but they need to be dynamic, similar to the seasons has been accepted by most designers of urban transitions, it seems that lately they are continuously caught in a turbulent storm. Climate crises are disturbing our landscapes, asking for urgent depavement, greening and making space for blue. People inhabiting spaces are expressing uncertainties via protests against new developments that disrupt their known ways of being: their space for cars, their individual dwellings and others. As designers we risk getting paralysed by questions like: what can we do and is what we do the right move? To go beyond a sense of paralisation, we explored in the last years what it means to design away from the storm by exploring what is underneath or in-between, in the lee. This enables us to rediscover what feeds the dynamic of the seasons: the care of people for each other, their environment, the water, the trees, but also their tendencies to withdraw from care in certain periods in the year or their lives. mentioned above (Huybrechts et al, 2020). While this dynamism