In 1993 the Dutch government initiated a housing programme of 634.800 houses to be built before the year 2015. This special programme is called Vinex, an abbreviation of Vierde Nota Ruimtelijke Ordening, in English: Fourth Report on Spatial Planning.
The locations were spread all over the country and settled in contracts between the State, Provinces and City’s. The size would differ from about 2000 houses up to 100.000, sometimes not bound to only one site in or nearby a city. The whole operation can be compared with the post-war reconstruction of the Netherlands.
For Utrecht it meant a big city extension of 30.000 houses (about 90.000 people) exclusive provisions like schools, shops, nurseries, sites for offices and small industrial activities (estimated amount of workers ca. 40.000).
Considering the fact Utrecht has an average of about 200.000 inhabitants you might easily understand the importance of this building campaign. Besides that, Utrecht centrally is located in Holland; a city with an important infrastructure and the extension to the west meant occupying precious natural resources, suspected archaeological sites, old farming land, orchards and incorporating two existing villages.
This was the reason that much attention was being paid to the urbanistic plan. You might say that Leidsche Rijn had to be the most perfect example of a Vinex area.
Also the city advisory board for visual arts in public space recognised the importance of this specific campaign and published a report on this matter titled A snowball of ten million (guilders), referring to the American artist David Hammons once selling snowballs on Cooper Square in New York. The advisory board recommended the citycouncel to initiate a special artprogramme for Leidsche Rijn. The advice was accepted and because of this a team was formed to work out a scenario. SKOR, Foundation for Art and Public Space, was invited to take part in this team and is since than involved in the development of the art programme.
The scenario, published in February 2001, was titled BEYOND, referring to a sentence in S,M,L,XL of Rem Koolhaas, saying: For each project there is a beyond a domain where no jury will follow.

The plan for Beyond is divided in six programmes:
1. Action Research. Mainly temporary projects and interventions by artists with a hopefully highly social interactive approach
2. Parasites. Experimental forms of light architecture, trying to promote urban life.
3. Looping. An interactive platform for information and debate.
4. White spots. Beyond as a project developer. Purchasing pieces of land for art projects or projects that might need the safe umbrella of art.
5. Artist houses. Meaning literally the possibility of building or intervening in the buildingprogrammes or commenting on the different housing typologies.
6. Direction artists. The addition of artist to designer teams, for instance for the realisation of infrastructural projects
Interaction between the programmes will be welcomed and it is very well possible that an artist invited for instance for action research comes up with a proposal that fits better in Parasites.

Partly due to the political situation in the city of Utrecht, new citycouncil elections etc., it lasted almost a year, before the scenario was excepted and the team behind Beyond could start with working out the plans. The first results appeared in the autumn of 2002 having a provisional climax with the exhibition ParasiteParadise in the summer of 2003.