Unbounded urbanization and the Horizontal Metropolis : the pragmatic program of August Mennes in the Antwerp agglomeration

Parallel to many discussions in other European cities, the debate on a metropolitan Antwerp emerged at the turn of the 20th century, following the decision to tear down the old ramparts around the city in 1904. Once boundless, the old core became for the first time the subject of a contiguous urban expansion at its very fringes. Soon, however, far more loose urbanization processes would wash over the land as the urban territories rapidly expanded beyond what was at first imagined. By consequence, the face of the future Antwerp metropolis would be shaped by a series of interlocking and unbounded urbanization processes. Tracing the interrelated endeavors of the key parties that helped shaping these urbanization processes, ranging from property tycoons, technocrats and architects to key figures in the political world, my PhD research aims at rendering the contours of a long history of the construction of Antwerp’s twentieth century belt within which the notions of urbanism and urbanization are blurred. Through an eclectic catalogue of five ‘urban questions’, this paper investigates the various ways in which the process of territorial rescaling set in motion in 1904 coproduced the features of today’s horizontal metropolis. Based on the activities of engineer August Mennes, the paper will try to conclude that the Antwerp Horizontal Metropolis surfaced as the result of a juxtaposition of urbanization techniques that question and transcend the interpretation of ‘urbanization’ as a process of random and speculative accumulation

Real Estate Pioneers on the Metropolitan Frontier. The works of Jean-Florian Collin and François Amelinckx in Antwerp

In the Belgian context, the production of Public Mass housing remained limited in scope. Apart from a few well published examples Cité Modèle & Kiel (Braem), Luchtbal (Van Kuyck), Cité de Droixhe (Groupe EGAU), Belgian housing policies focused on the promotion of private homeownership. Mass housing in Belgium took the form of the massive production of private houses, constituting a sprawled urban landscape that has been described as the ‘banlieue radieuse’. Less studied is the short lived but quantitatively significant private production of large scale high-rise apartments. This paper studies the close relationship between the production of these very different forms of ‘mass housing’: low- and high rise, inner-city and suburban. While the public policy context is rather well known, the private developers that produced this landscape have hardly been studied. This paper studies major players (Amelinckx n.v., Etrimo n.v., Extensa n.v.) and the architectural and development models through which they managed to create and capture a vast market of commodified housing. Through the detailed reconstruction of large scale commercial development schemes in Antwerp and Brussels, the paper describes the optimism of these mavericks of the Belgian property boom and recollects the radiant suburban promise they delivered. Although these property tycoons seem to have had little difficulty in luring in the middle classes and in persuading local political boards, today it becomes clear that the premises on the basis of which they sold the suburban dream were imbued with a thin instantaneous optimism that turned out to be too precarious to keep up with the subsequent impact of urbanization. While their activities are mostly remembered for the trauma of their bankruptcy, affecting many small contractors and private investors, this paper will highlight the collective failure to embed these large scale endeavours within enduring and intelligent (public) urban development strategies

Real Estate Pioneers on the Metropolitan Frontier

In the Belgian context, the production of Public Mass housing remained limited in scope. Apart from a few well published examples Cité Modèle & Kiel (Braem), Luchtbal (Van Kuyck), Cité de Droixhe (Groupe EGAU), Belgian housing policies focused on the promotion of private homeownership. Mass housing in Belgium took the form of the massive production of private houses, constituting a sprawled urban landscape that has been described as the ‘banlieue radieuse’. Less studied is the short lived but quantitatively significant private production of large scale high-rise apartments. This paper studies the close relationship between the production of these very different forms of ‘mass housing’: low- and high rise, inner-city and suburban. While the public policy context is rather well known, the private developers that produced this landscape have hardly been studied. This paper studies major players (Amelinckx n.v., Etrimo n.v., Extensa n.v.) and the architectural and development models through which they managed to create and capture a vast market of commodified housing. Through the detailed reconstruction of large scale commercial development schemes in Antwerp and Brussels, the paper describes the optimism of these mavericks of the Belgian property boom and recollects the radiant suburban promise they delivered.Although these property tycoons seem to have had little difficulty in luring in the middle classes and in persuading local political boards, today it becomes clear that the premises on the basis of which they sold the suburban dream were imbued with a thin instantaneous optimism that turned out to be too precarious to keep up with the subsequent impact of urbanization. While their activities are mostly remembered for the trauma of their bankruptcy, affecting many small contractors and private investors, this paper will highlight the collective failure to embed these large scale endeavours within enduring and intelligent (public) urban development strategies

Urbanisons! Urbanising the Antwerp agglomeration, 1907-1939

Dit proefschrift onderzoekt een episode in de geschiedenis van de ruimtelijke ontwikkeling van België die tot dusver slechts sporadisch aandacht kreeg: het verstedelijken van de grote agglomeraties aan het begin van de twintigste eeuw. De Antwerpse case, en met name het werk van de "Studiecommissie ter inrichting van de Antwerpse Agglomeratie" (SCAA) wordt in de diepte bestudeerd als exemplarisch voor deze periode. De kennisbijdrage van dit werk is dubbel. Enerzijds documenteert dit proefschrift de ‘longue durée’ van de werkzaamheden van de SCAA en diens concrete bijdrage aan de historische ontwikkeling van 'Groter Antwerpen'. Anderzijds moet dit werk gelezen worden als een poging om het soort stedenbouw dat de SCAA uitoefende te conceptualiseren als "l'art de l'urbanisation" zoals het werk van de SCAA gekarakteriseerd werd in eigentijdse literatuur. Een opvatting van stedenbouw die vertrok vanuit een sterk verstedelijkingsbegrip en die op een heel andere leest gestoeld was dan de vele stedenbouwkundige modellen die aan het begin van de twintigste eeuw het licht zagen in de Internationale context. In die zin probeert het proefschrift een andersoortige epistemologie van de stedenbouw te exploreren. Een kennisleer die aanknopingspunten zoekt in kritische en verstedelijkings-theoretische kaders – een benadering die die erg relevant lijkt in het huidige tijdperk van veralgemeende verstedelijking

Transactional real estate for the metropolis

This paper examines how transactional spaces between architects, policy-makers and a rising scene of real estate developers contributed the production of a metropolitan ‘cadre de vie’ in Interwar Belgium. It uses the case of the Sterreplein in Elsene (Brussels) to illustrate the rise (and decline) of real estate architecture as the cornerstone for the production of a coherent ‘cityscape’. During the interwar period, the shared ‘architectural style’ which was embedded in institutional contexts and mutual debates on metropolitan development was gradually replaced by economic interests, both in administrative and in professional circles – an evolution that would continue to grow, especially after WWII. The case is substantiated by the involvement of the two most iconic apartment developers Belgium has known in the twentieth century: Jean-Florian Collin (Etrimo) and François Amelinckx (Entreprises Amelinckx). Both developers are mostly remembered and generally disregarded for their standardized and commodified housing slabs from the ‘60s and ‘70s. However, our case reveals that their less-known interwar housing experiments were much more permeated with architectural and urban aspirations. A pluralistic and mutual debate on ‘metropolization’ seems to have contributed to the quality and imagination of residential real estate architecture. As such our research exposes the social preconditions within which real estate architecture can make a meaningful contribution to the housing of an urbanizing society. Challenging definitions of architecture as a liberal profession that continue to frame the study of architecture, we aim to render that these housing products were determined by external (cultural, political, economic, urban, …) conditions which were beyond the architects’ and developers’ control. Rather, these conditions were determined by society at large. As such, the paper attributes to the conviction that ‘people make history, but not in the circumstances of their own choosing’ and that urban society ‘gets the kind of real estate development it deserves’