Profondeville

Profondeville is a municipality assembling six villages in the Haute-Meuse river valley situated 80 km south-east of Brussels, in the Namur Province, Belgium. All six villages count around 12 000 inhabitants.
Profondeville is not famous for its cathedrals, museums or monuments, but for its rich and picturesque nature (out of 50,34 km², 50 % is farming land and 27 % are forests). The area is famous for its paragliding spots, underground cavities good for speleology, outdoor activities such as hiking and bicycling and, above all, water sports on the Meuse river.
Profondeville’s villages also have a reputation for the vivid social life they offer. All year long festivities set the pace for gatherings that strengthen social ties and help newcomers to get involved.
Located near the city of Namur, Profondeville faces the stakes of many suburban villages. It has to keep its rural identity and quality of life while accompanying the unavoidable development of housing and tertiary sectors.

Country

Belgium Wallonia

Type

not specific

Degree of urbanization

rural

population of 12192

VILLAGE STRATEGY

Village Solutions

Sentinel trucks

Profondeville has partnered with the BEP’s award-winning Sentinel trucks project, aiming at equipping domestic garbage collection trucks (which cover the entirety of the municipal road network every week) with multipurpose racks for environmental data collection, starting with a first use case gathering geolocalized data on mobile phone coverage and signal strength. While this use case is important to address “blank spots” in coverage, we intend to imagine other use cases allowing for new sensors to be plugged on the racks

Mobility & connectivity

Citizen participation Governance

Citizen engagement into public debate is essential, and when successful, it's extremely powerful. The authorities have lead a few experiments in that intent: they have used an online platform to gather opinions on Profondeville's old town future, they have organized general public meetings in each of the 6 villages, and ad hoc public meetings on specific subjects within a neighbourhood or a village. In the future, more experiments will be lead such as participatory budgets, randomly selected focus groups or citizen assemblies. With this experience, a proper methodology and toolbox could be consolidated in a way that the many people become familiar with the solutions.

Data gathering and management

We have currently 6 mobile analyzers that gather traffic data on sensitive spots. In 2019, we decided to plan and organize the traffic analyses. But the management, storage and use of this data is still rudimentary. We would like to set up a system where every bit of gathered traffic data could be stored and properly used for different means. Also, the whole data lifecycle could be implemented, up to making it public, so that everyone can see what the traffic is in their neighborhood, how it compares to other places and how it evolves over time.

Mobility & connectivity

Contact Information