Truck Stop Border Project: A Polyphonic Space of Transit

- Design Team: studio ilinx & import.export Architecture

- Collaborators: ESPORG, ABVV-BTB, AR-TUR

- 2025-ongoing

Truck Stop Border Project: A Polyphonic Space of Transit is a spatial research–design project. It analyses spatial conditions and potentials of the NL-BE border-truck-stops and their surroundings. The project approaches the truck stops beyond logistics and approaches them as socio-cultural meeting points and as spaces for rest for drivers and others.

The research is trans-scalar ranging from the XL scale of the European regulations to the XS scale of the intimate truck cabin’s interior. It uses diverse methods of spatial analysis such as archival research, mapping, drawing, workshopping, etc. Through these methods, it analyzes multiple spatial issues and potentials. The result of the first phase is published as a book.  

The project understands truck stops as “border projects” in themselves, while focusing specifically on multiple truck stops located in the Hazeldonk–Meer Logistic Park, an industrial and logistics “island” that extends across both sides of NL-BE border.

In the second phase of the project and inspired by truckers’ hacking methods and “objet trouvés” found on site, a number of micro-interventions or “Border-happenings”  will be made on site. These are new spatio-temporal situations for bodily care, meeting and exchange that are introduced during an event.

Truck Stop Border Project brings attention to making the truck stops more humanized and inclusive. Through “soft activism” it raises awareness and through making new relations it highlights the region’s local specificities,. Brings new perspectives and suggests new  forms of collaboration.

Main collaborators of the project are truckers, ABVV-BTB, AR-TUR, and Truck Stop Joost.

This project is kindly supported by the Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie.