Two years after the first edition, the Villageness Festival returns. This time, we look beyond the familiar divide between urban and rural and ask how villageness might be understood as a continuum.

In Belgium, where city and countryside have long been woven into a dispersed and increasingly complex territory, clean spatial zoning categories seem increasingly inadequate. The village is no longer simply a place outside the city. It can be found within the city, at its edges, along infrastructural corridors, in suburban landscapes and across the dispersed metropolis. Rather than a fixed condition, villageness may be understood as a gradient: a way of living, relating to each other or the landscape, imagining and shaping space that appears in many different territorial contexts.

This raises new questions for designers, researchers, policymakers and communities. What happens when we move from thinking in terms of urban versus rural towards degrees of urbanity and rurality? Can the village become a lens through which we understand the dispersed territory itself? And what spatial practices, forms of collective life and commoning practices emerge in the spaces in between?

The second Villageness Festival brings together projects, ideas and experiences that explore this continuum, from partners in Flanders and Wallonia. It builds on the growing body of knowledge around village urbanism, while opening the discussion towards the wider territory in which villages, towns and cities are entangled. Villageness is therefore not a place, but a condition: something that can be found, produced and transformed across the territory. This year’s festival is an invitation to explore that condition—and to rethink the boundaries through which we continue to read our landscapes.