Mariënburg: repurposing religious heritage for education and housing

The reason for redevelopment of the monastery is linked to the increasing secularization, that is a worldwide phenomenon, in turn leading to questions about adaptive reuse of religious heritage. Since much of (former) religious buildings can be a burden on a city and space is limited within the urban environment, the municipality looked at the possibility to maintain the building, while repurposing it to current needs. By accommodating a graduate school in the building, combined with student housing, the education function that was linked to the monastery in its heyday has returned to the inner city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch. By repurposing the building, current needs (student housing and education in data science) have been accommodated. In this way, the project not only profits the investor, but helps to revitalise a part of the city by bringing in students, increases social security by adding “extra eyes” to the area and maintains an iconic building for future generations. In this case, several stakeholders can be identified: the former congregation, who wanted to sell the building, the investor that bought the building and financed the redevelopment, both Tilburg and Eindhoven University, that are “knowledge partners” in charge of education and the municipalities of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Eindhoven and Tilburg for the combined (student) housing solution. The redevelopment of Mariënburg itself has been added to policy documents, such as urban plans and the cities heritage vision.