New city office in Ghent opened!
03.02.2023
The new Ghent City Office will open its doors today, Friday, Feb. 3, on the Zuid. It will be the beating heart of Ghent's services and administration. The building will also be the workplace of 1,450 city employees.
All services in the City Office will come together in one large public area. Centrally there is the reception desk of Gentinfo for general questions. In addition, citizens of Ghent can go to the quick counters for a travel pass, for a change of address or to the themed counters for other questions. In addition to the open desks, there are also consultation and meeting rooms for more sensitive issues. The public area is child-friendly and accessible with ergonomic and dynamic waiting furniture, whose colors are coordinated with the signage. Underneath the City Office there is a spacious bicycle storage area.
The new City Office brings all services and counters together in one central location. You will find easy-to-use quick counters, but also separate consultation rooms for more complex dossiers. In order to optimize our services, we crawled into the mind of the citizen. How can they find their way most easily? How can they be helped fastest? Because even in digital times, physical service remains very important.
New home of 1,450 employees
In addition to the public zone, there is also a separate zone for staff. After all, the City Office will be home to 1,450 city employees. They do not have a fixed workplace there, but choose a place according to their activities. A third of the spaces consist of common meeting places including meeting and project rooms. In the back office, ergonomic furniture was chosen, with old furniture also being reused. Thus, thanks to social economy, former school chairs were given a second life and the counters from the EGW building are recovered and converted into tables for the meeting rooms.
Sustainability
Finally, during the construction of the City Office, there was a strong focus on sustainability. To this end, the City is going through a process in which an external organization monitors sustainability during the design and implementation phases. Some of the energy-efficient and energy-saving measures: high-quality thermal insulation of facades and roofs, energy recovery from ventilation air, triple glazing, recovery of residual heat from the data center, LED lighting, green facades and roofs, solar panels and reuse of rainwater.
source: Stad Gent
