The aim of RENATUR is to draw attention to the importance of peri-urban open spaces and their natural heritage in order to preserve it. For this purpose, model regions were selected, which have a great interest in the promotion and protection of the natural heritage of peri-urban open spaces in planning practice.
One of these model regions is Flanders, with the Flemish Land Agency as partner in the RENATUR project. The instrument that the Flemish Land Agency will improve is ‘reparcelling by virtue of law with zoning exchange’. This instrument is one of the instruments of the toolbox in the Flemish Parliament Act on Land Development (28 March 2014 – published in Belgian Official Gazette 22 August 2014).
The improvement is reached by the identification, analysis, dissemination and transfer of good practices and policy experiences related to the protection of natural heritage of peri-urban open spaces into regional policy instruments. To work on this, we organized the first RENATUR interregional workshop online!
The workshop, which also included a peer review process, brought together the RENATUR partners, peer experts from all partner regions, and Flemish stakeholders for:


1. Learning about Flemish peri-urban open spaces and case studies
2. Exchanging experiences and good practices about the policy instrument ‘reparcelling by virtue of law with zoning exchange’
3. Working out suggestions on the improved implementation of the policy instrument by:       
making it possible to use this instrument for trans-municipality projects (for two or more adjacent municipalities)

  • improving the coordination between the instruments of land use implementation plans and reparcelling by virtue of law
  • making it possible to use the instruments for projects where it is sufficient to change the regulation for land use and not the destination 
  • increasing number of projects using this instrument to realize improved land use and protection of peri-urban open spaces


During the workshop, a vast number of presentations were provided. Some information are already available in Dutch here.

A video with good practices is available here.

A full workshop report in english, including all contents and results of discussions, will soon be available  here.