The Brussels office address was rue de … Suède, 36 in Saint-Gilles but now has moved to Forest. Murielle Dasnoy and Christophe Mercier develop projects and promote reflection on the processes behind urban management from an eclectic office that often consults the public and encourages analytical and creative dialogue.

The agency works on various levels through urban planning and architecture projects. For some years now focus has been on public spaces and children’s play areas. The agency team varies depending on the project. They work with designers, artists and re-use specialists.

Through working on complicated urban-planning and public-space projects it is clear how useful a role you can play as mediator, assistant and expert in fully understanding public works, in particular when there are multiple actors working on a given issue. Good examples of this are the boulevard du Saint-Lazare and l’îlot Scailquin projects where Suède 36 was go-between and intermediary.

The areas of activity stated above sometimes rely on what you might call ‘participation’, a term we try to avoid as it can lead to confusion. For us the aim is to build constructive dialogue both with project users and all those involved in the design and future management of the project. These are key stages in our work allowing us to analyse and feed into a project, drive our creativity or check that options given are relevant.

Our agency isn’t looking to expand for expansion’s sake but rather to better respond to each challenge and acquire the necessary expertise. That is why we have increased the number of projects we work on. It’s also an excellent strategy for enriching our breadth of knowledge. We have worked with designers from Blink (Walking Madou), re-use experts at Rotor (Place de Liverpool), the artist Anna Rispoli (Bon État area), landscape artist Ana Beja da Costa (Tivoli Competition), mobility specialists at Tritel-Technum (Mouscron), the Buurthuis community centre (Bonnevie), lighting designer Isabelle Corten (Piétro), identity and marketing experts at Minale Design Strategy (future outline for shopping districts) and various urban-planning and architectural bureaus for competitions or one-off projects (Pierre Blondel, Sébastien Moreno, Bob 361, B-architecten, Periphériques...)