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

The prefigurative power of urban political agroecology: rethinking the urbanisms of agroecological transitions for food system transformation

In recent years, urban contexts and urban-rural linkages have become central for scholars and activists engaged in agrarian questions, agroecological transitions and food system transformation. Grassroots experimentations in urban agroecology and farmers' engagement with urban policies have marked the rise of a new agenda aiming to bridge urban and agrarian movements. Departing from the work of Eric Holt-Gimenez and Annie Shattuck, this paper argues that the way urban-rural links have been conceptualized is occasionally progressive, and that an agroecology-informed food system transformation needs radical approaches. Acknowledging that processes of urbanization are dynamic, driven by specific lifestyles, consumption patterns, and value orientations - producing ongoing suburbanization, land enclosures, farmers displacement and food-knowledge loss - the paper argues that thinking transitions through new rural-urban links is unfit to tackle the evolving nature of these geographies, and reproduces the distinction between consumers and producers, living on either side of what Mindi Schneider and Philip McMichael have described as an epistemic and ecological rift. Building on insights from four case-studies across global north and south, the paper reframes agroecological transitions as a paradigmatic change in biopolitical spatial relations, economic values and planning agency - what we call an 'agroecological urbanism'. The paper articulates a transformation agenda addressing urban nutrients, peri-urban landuse, community food pedagogies and farmers' infrastructure

Suburban Renewal: Grounding Urban Design in a Theory of Urbanization

The revival of urban design in the past 25 years has been supported by a discourse centered around compact city policies and the design of public space. This discursive kernel is being challenged as the agenda of urban renewal is shifting from the urban core to the (old) suburbs and the fringes of the metropolitan area. Within the context of ‘suburban renewal’, the discipline of urban design has to come to terms with ‘new urban questions’ that emerge within the contemporary context of a boundless process of urbanization (Merrifield 2014) – a process that is increasingly taking shape through variable geometries and scales, changing the territorial frames within which it is governed. The context of ‘suburban renewal’ provides the right background to reconstruct the question of ‘collective consumption’ as part of a wholesale process of ecological retrofitting. This paper argues that today’s efforts of ‘suburban renewal’ contain fertile leads to build new matters of concern beyond the traditional focus on the city (Wachsmuth 2014) and ground urban design within a theory of urbanization (Brenner 2014). In order to substantiate this argument, this paper will discuss the results of the urban design Laboratory Labo XX within which the city of Antwerp asked four urban design firms to devise strategies for the renewal of its suburban belt (Grafe, Verhaert, et.al. 2014)

Collective learning experiences in planning: the potential of experimental living labs

‘Living labs’ originate from an R&D environment, and intend to innovate commodities by experience-based knowledge, with a direct involvement of users. Meanwhile, the living labs approach has been shifting into a wider range of applications, and has also ended up in the toolbox of actor- and action-oriented planners. The approach is (implicitly) promoted as a new and better way of combining capacities of different stakeholders by exploring and experimenting in realworld situations. In this paper, we attempt to critically discuss the use of the living lab approach. The first section explores the potential thereof for planning issues: How univocal is the concept of Living Labs? How much do different interpretations and practices of Living Labs resemble in terms of actors involved, actions stimulated, processes promoted and criteria for good practices accepted? The exploration is based on the experience of two experimental living labs, which are compared with a range of international examples. The second section turns to a series of alternative approaches in spatial planning in Flanders: How do the aims and means of these collaborative learning experiences differ? What is the role of users and how important is experimentation? What is the innovative contribution to planning (if any)? How do the practices deal with path dependencies and uncertainties in complex multi-actor settings? We will answer these questions based on research seminars on ‘collective learning’, which are organized for the Policy Research Center Spatial Planning in Flanders, as a part of a work-package which focusses on methodologies for future explorations

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

From agriculture in the city to an agroecological urbanism : the transformative pathway of urban (political) agroecology

In this article we capture three things at once: the reason for this special issue of UAM on Urban Agroecology, the thinking behind the 8th Annual Conference of the AESOP Sustainable Food Planning (SFP) group (Coventry, 2017) and the core mission of the International Forum for an Agroecological Urbanism. The Forum and the Magazine will be launched at the AESOP SFP conference whose theme this year is “Reimagining food planning, building resourcefulness: Food movements, insurgent planning and heterodox economics