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In spite of a Flemish planning policy thatstrived the last decennia at conserving the city (or urbanareas) and countryside both as functionally andmorphologically separable entities and as antipoles, it isobserved that due to an unrestrained suburbanisation cityand countryside become increasingly interwoven inFlanders. People still reproduce space in these two spatialcategories but society and governments are no longercapable in producing this symbolic space in a physical andsocial way. It is clear that a top-down imposed,uniformising planning discourse is not able to get a grip onpresent urbanising processes and therefore alternativestory-lines are needed.An alternative story line of ‘open space as public space’,points at the societal importance of public space and couldbe useful in understanding the challenges in presentnetwork society. In a context in which almost the entireFlemish space is ‘urban’, open-space-fragments seem to beable to fulfil a role as public space and have to becomestructuring spatial elements for further urbanisation.Three success factors in (designing) planning the openspace seem to have the potential to be a lot more essentialto the spatial visioning on open space fragments/ruralareas than the current functional delineation of parts ofthe natural and agricultural structure.At the same time it is clear that multifunctionalagriculture (MFA), meeting a broad spectrum of societaldemands, is strongly related to the critical success factorsfor a good functioning of ‘public open space’, not on thereference scale of urban public space but on that of thecollective open space at the regional level. A financingconstruction, which contains three possible alternativefinancing mechanisms for collective services, has a lot ofpotential in reinforcing the ‘public open space’. Aproactive and offensive role of governments seems crucialin setting up this financing construction.
