The new town hall in Middelburg, the capital of the Dutch province of Zeeland and home to nearly 48,000 people, was designed by the German-Dutch architectural firm RAU and built between 2002 and 2004. But a slew of extraordinary planning had to be overcome before the building could be opened because a canal, a railroad line with a station, a highway, and in the middle of all of this, a barely developed rail yard divided Middleburg and cut off the historic city centre from the south. There really could be only one goal: to transform this zone into a vibrant area that connected the historical parts of the city.