Governing economic interests : interwar road construction in Belgian Congo = La gouvernance des intérêts économiques : la construction de routes coloniales pendant l’entre-deux-guerres au Congo belge

Contrary to the well-recognised relation between railroad infrastructure and emerging cities in the Belgian colony, the development of the Congolese road network was more closely connected to accessing the colonial hinterland and the expanding the rural economy. This latter link remains underresearched in both Congo’s and Africa’s transportation history, even if the colonial government equally considered road infrastructure a tool of empire. This article deconstructs this super-reducing concept of tools of empire in search of a better understanding of the complex reality of how centrally-defined road policies landed ‘on the ground’ in the vast Congolese hinterland. Studying the interwar development of the road network in the Cataractes-Nord region demonstrates how everyday colonial policymaking relied deeply on the aptitude and agency of private entrepreneurs and government officials alike, in a first step to truly understand the forces at play in the opening up of the Congolese countryside.Contrairement à la relation bien reconnue entre le développement de l’infrastructure ferroviaire et les villes émergentes de la colonie belge, le développement du réseau routier congolais était plus étroitement lié à l’accès à l’arrière-pays colonial et à l’expansion de l’économie rurale. Ce dernier lien reste trop peu investigué dans l’histoire des transports au Congo et en Afrique, même si le gouvernement colonial considérait également l’infrastructure routière comme un « tool of empire » (« outil d'Empire »). Cet article déconstruit ce concept réducteur de « tool of empire » en cherchant à mieux comprendre la réalité complexe de la façon dont les politiques routières du niveau central ont été transposées sur le terrain dans l’arrière-pays congolais. L’étude du développement du réseau routier pendant l’entre-deux-guerres dans la région des Cataractes-Nord montre comment l’élaboration quotidienne des politiques routières coloniales reposait considérablement sur l’aptitude et la capacité d’action des entrepreneurs privés et des fonctionnaires du gouvernement, dans un premier temps pour comprendre les forces en jeu dans l’ouverture de la campagne congolaise

An investigation of road infrastructure at the intersection of colonial policies and economic interest in the Bas-Congo region, 1929-1949

Focussing on the evolution of the road network built in the Belgian Congo during the interwar period, the paper aims to fill a gap in the current historiography of planning in the Belgian colony as well as in Central Africa. Limiting themselves almost exclusively to fluvial, airline and, most importantly, the railway navigation, existing scholars tended to focus on urban planning issues, as railroads played a major role in linking emerging cities and thus helped structure the urbanisation of the colony. However, the road network in colonial Congo was more closely linked with the development of the countryside and the upcoming rural economy, a connection underresearched in current historiography on the spatiality of colonialism. It is remarkable that the most informative source on the topic of Congo’s road infrastructure remains a technical report written by engineer Egide-Jean Devroey, a prominent employee of the Ministry of Colonies(1939). Devroey makes a division between routes d’intérêt général and routes d’intérêt local, the former being a category of roads to be funded by the government, while the latter were to be build and maintained by the firm they benefitted. In reality however, these categories often blurred, and entrepreneurs wanting a road on the working terrain played on the feelings of economic gain and dissent between the different levels of colonial administration, in order to obtain financing for private roads of intérêt local. By investigating one such case through mapping the road network, discussing the different actors involved in its making and the opening up of a specific territory (including also missionary congregations for instance), this paper will provide a powerful lens through which we can gain a better understanding of the forces at play in the transformation brought about in the Congolese countryside

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’

‘Captains of industry’ of the metropolitan nexus : private mass housing development in twentieth-century Belgium

This paper focusses on the production of the two major commercial residential developers, Jean-Florian Collin (Etrimo) and François Amelinckx (Amelinckx N.V.), who constructed over 70,000 apartments in the metropolitan agglomerations of Belgium between 1924 and 1985. Their short-lived, but large-scale, production defines an ‘invisible city’ of which we know very little but can be used to analyse key aspects of the process of twentieth-century metropolization in Belgium. Both developers were ‘champions of a game of their creation’, as they applied precise strategies in constructing specific circumstances that seized the latent potential of development (that hovered over the capitalist metropolitan landscape) into concrete, often opportunistically defined, built commodities. By applying a production perspective on planning history, it is possible to look at the processes of metropolitan expansion and twentieth-century planning in Belgium from a different angle, starting from the actual built reality and the ‘captains of industry’ that this urban reality was grounded upon. A perspective which has been little-applied in the Belgian case, and is particularly pertinent for interpreting development patterns in a context like Belgium that lacks a strong planning culture and is historically compromised the absence of an emancipated scene of developers ready to take on the urban agenda