Facility Pooling

Gelderse Achterhoek

The population of Achterhoek is ageing rapidly. The decline in villager numbers is weakening the economic base for an increasing number of services. This problem can be remedied if villages share facilities. The phenomenon of facility pooling has many precedents, particularly in the agricultural sector, where almost everything was bought and sold on the doorstep. The idea behind this project is to breathe new life into the culture of amenities on wheels and expand it considerably so that a new generation of facility vehicles can travel through Achterhoek, calling to different villages one by one or in fleets. Although the rationale for such vehicles is efficiency, they can also help revitalise the Achterhoek countryside. The fact that a travelling amenity stops in a village for a limited period will encourage villagers to seize its arrival as an opportunity to meet one another. Just as in the era of the rag-and-bone man and the milkman, when people also `turned out` to do business, today this new generation of facility vehicles could shake up sleepy villagers and their ritual-craving senior citizens.