The Place That Said No

16,000 people were asked what the place should become. In Bruges, a place that had been closed for four hundred years opened its doors. The reflex of our sector was to programme it. The community had other ideas.

In my last piece, I wrote about why regenerative development starts with the place, not tourism — and briefly mentioned an abbey in Bruges that put that thinking into practice. This is that story.

For four centuries, nobody could walk into the Sint-Godelieve Abbey on the Boeveriestraat. Benedictine nuns lived there, wrote in their rooms, grew their vegetables, and kept the gate shut. Two hundred and fifty years into that silence, the Capuchin friars settled across the street. Then, a few years ago, the last nuns moved into a care home. The government bought the buildings and the land to protect them.

Photo Credit: Visit Bruges, KADOC LEUVEN

And there it was — the question every tourism board eventually faces. What do we do with it?

We know the reflex answer. A boutique hotel in the cloister. A restaurant with a terrace in the garden. A ticketed route with an audio guide, open 10 to 18, closed Mondays. It is bankable, it is fundable, and it is exactly what would have happened in any other European city with a heritage building and a funding gap.

That is precisely the problem. It is how places end up swimming in the 'sea of sameness'.

We asked, instead of programmed

In 2021, the abbey opened for a few weeks. VisitFlanders and the City of Bruges did not fill those weeks with a product. They filled them with a question.

Residents hosted newcomers. Neighbours moved objects across the street by hand. Concerts and lectures brought in expertise from eight different domains — historians, archaeologists, economists, biologists. Secondary school students were asked what they saw. More than 16,000 people came, and nearly 5,000 of them left a small story behind. Those micro-narratives were analysed with SenseMaker, and the patterns in them were handed to the experts as the raw material for future scenarios.

What came back was more specific than anyone expected. People imagined workspaces in the former dormitories — because that is where the nuns had written and worked alone. They imagined kitchen gardens — because that is where the nuns had grown their food.

And they said no to a hotel. No to a restaurant.

The community did not ask for less tourism. They asked for a use that the place could still recognise itself in.

The soul belongs in the research

Understanding a place is not a checklist exercise with a landscape photo and a heritage inventory attached.

In Bruges, roughly a quarter of the historic centre is still linked to religious heritage. That is not a category on a database; it is one of the deepest layers of who this city is. So a Genius Loci study looked at how every building, garden and ritual on the site expressed a spiritual vocation. Researchers went and interviewed the Benedictine nuns themselves — their memories, their meanings, their attachments — to capture something that does not survive in an archive.

Caring for the soul of a place turns out to be as serious a discipline as caring for its soil and its society. It is also what made the later decisions easy. Once you know what the abbey is, you no longer need a committee to tell you that a cocktail bar in the chapel would be wrong.

Small experiments beat a masterplan

Nothing waited for the restoration to finish.

The orchard was opened to the public. A pop-up archaeological garden appeared. There were collective art installations, craft workshops, storytelling. Local schoolchildren buried time capsules for a generation that will open them long after all of us have stopped attending conferences about this.

Every one of these was treated as an experiment, not as a launch. Residents and entrepreneurs ran them, and the learnings were documented alongside them.

Small interventions, in a place that is deeply understood, ripple much further than a strategy document ever does.

The hard part comes after the beautiful part

I want to be honest about where this stands, because the glossy version of this story is not useful to anyone.

Turning temporary energy into a mature, durable organisation is where it gets difficult. Shared governance. Distributed ownership. Decentralised decision-making. And then the very unromantic reality of procurement rules, shareholder structures, and finding the right partners through systems that were designed for a different kind of project entirely. Some things — opening hours, branding — may have to be imposed just to make the whole thing function.

That phase is still running. It takes years, not seasons.

Photo Credit: Visit Bruges, Thomas de Boever

What this asks of you

If you work in tourism, the shift is uncomfortable but simple to state. You stop being the one who programmes a place and start being the one who convenes around it. You bring the voices that are rarely in the room, including the ones that do not speak. You invest in understanding before you invest in marketing.

And you accept the possibility that the answer, for some places, is that tourism has no role to play at all. That is not a failure of the process. That is the process working.

The abbey will open properly one day. People will come — fewer of them than a hotel would have delivered, and different ones. They will come because the place is alive and worth entering into a relationship with.