Natural Hypertransformation: Agriculture in Belgium and the Netherlands 2100

Using the railway to rethink agriculture

Natural Hypertransformation: Agriculture in Belgium and the Netherlands 2100 is our research-by-design proposal for reconnecting food production, transport infrastructure and ecological restoration across the Belgian-Dutch borderlands. Agriculture covers a major part of Antwerp, Limburg and North Brabant, while climate change, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, water pressure and greenhouse-gas emissions are becoming more urgent. Conventional production patterns leave little space for natural systems to recover.

We asked whether major rail investment could become more than a transport project. The Trans-European Transport Network is intended to improve connections and shorten travel times. In our proposal, that connectivity becomes an opportunity to reorganise agriculture’s physical footprint and reconnect fragmented landscapes across the border. The area already brings commercial, industrial, urban and agricultural activity together, so it offers a particularly rich place to test that idea.

The Agriway as a regional backbone

We call the approach ‘hypertransformation’ because it deliberately aims high. The proposed Agriway is a green megastructure along and above rail infrastructure. It could host land-independent forms of production such as vertical farming, alternative proteins, seaweed and fungi cultivation. Stations would become places for processing and distribution. By concentrating selected parts of food production along the rail axis, the system could shorten supply chains and reduce the land needed for conventional agriculture.

That scenario depends on a wider dietary shift towards less land-intensive consumption and on new economic models for food. Land released from intensive agriculture could then become a network of regenerative green clusters. These could reconnect reserves, improve water management, support soil recovery and increase ecological resilience near settlements.

We do not claim that a railway can solve climate change on its own. The proposal is a spatial imagination for linking mobility, food and nature restoration at a regional scale. Its value lies in seeing the railway not merely as a line through the landscape, but as a platform for another territorial future—one in which agricultural change can create both new livelihoods and more room for living systems.