ARCHPRIS · Territories of incarceration. A comparative study of prison farms in rural Europe and a proposal for Flanders.

A Prison Farm (PF) is a correctional facility located in rural environments where inmates are employed in open-air manual work.Within the current European carceral archipelagos, mostly constituted of mass urban walled prisons and recent suburban super prisons, PFs are limited in number and scope and often disregarded by national and EU policies, and by academic studies. Yet, PFs show potential in addressing the EU's wills to: improve the current state of incarceration while reducing its scope; promote sustainable agriculture and rural development. The IF's objective is to tackle these 2 societal challenges with a pilot project for a network of detention farmhouses that will be tested in the territorial condition of Flanders, a EU region suffering from an increase loss of farms. The project adopts a research-by-design methodology and will follow a groundwork comparative study of the space of selected existing PFs in Belgium, Italy, and Finland, aiming at the acquisition and systematization of a currently missing knowledge on European PFs. The project will be based -while extending its scope to the rural condition- on the cutting-edge institutional model elaborated by the NGO De Huizen, whose proposal for a network of urban small-scale contextually integrated detention houses is challenging the current penal system in Belgium. The supporting network of the host and partner institutions (KU Leuven-Dept.of Architecture, VUB-Dept.of Criminology, De Huizen), and of key members from Belgian public authorities in the sectors of prison and rural development, constitutes a unique interdisciplinary milieu of knowledge and expertise that will guarantee the success of the IF.This will impact the fellow's career, evolving her expertise in the field of prison architecture while expanding her critical insight on broader theoretical themes around the empowerment of architecture in directing human behaviour and the relationship between architecture-institutions-large scale territory.