'Cette autre nécessité essentielle: 'l'urbanisation': electrification and the Urbanisation of the Nebular City

The advent of modern utility systems together with improved transport infrastructures and information technologies introduced new spatial arrangements and temporalities in the territory. In time, these reveal a notion of urbanisation that does not only takes place in or directly adjacent to the traditional (territorially bounded) city, but in which co-evolving processes lead to differentiated territorial arrangements. Belgium’s distributed urban condition – the ‘nebular city’ – emerged out of the interplay of such multiple territorial arrangements. Often, it is explained by a historical roots in policies of industrial dispersal, while historical efforts to actively accommodate and organise the territory from the broader perspective of urbanisation are assigned a secondary role only. This article, however, takes a close look at two projects from the 1930’s that took the emerging condition of dispersal as their starting point and which both reflect on the role of urbanisation in the reproduction of the conditions in which industrialisation, among other processes of modernisation, can take place. In particular aspects surrounding the Belgian electrification are examined. Although not one of their main drivers, the electrification is both intertwined with the rise of industrial production and the development of an urban modern lifestyle. Only in the 1930’s, however, Belgian spatial planners started to explore issues concerning the distribution of electricity and its spatial and economic consequences. Both projects are embedded within the international debate on the functional city and present Belgium as a particular case. They show the general delay and mismatch between the process of industrialisation and urbanisation because of the nation’s chosen development path, both in spatial and temporal terms

How to build a brain

Your cells are magnificent little things, every single one is full of complex microsystems all working together to keep you going. They’re more intricate and advanced than any machines we can make, but sometimes… they need a little help to get going. Stem cells are like tiny teenagers, they’re full of potential but they need a kick in the pants to get going, and that’s where I come in. After a stroke, patients are left with chunks of damaged brain tissue. Now, instead of trying to rebuild the incredibly complex human brain from scratch, I’d much give cells the support and encouragement they need to rebuild it themselves. My research goal is to rebuild damaged brain tissue, but in truth, stem cells will be doing all the actual building, I’m just making materials that tell them how to build a brain

Consensus, Cohesion and Connectivity

Social life clusters into groups held together by ties that also transmit information. When collective problems occur, group members use their ties to discuss what to do and to establish an agreement, to be reached quick enough to prevent discounting the value of the group decision. The speed at which a group reaches consensus can be predicted by the algebraic connectivity of the network, which also imposes a lower bound on the group's cohesion. This specific measure of connectivity is put to the test by re-using experimental data, which confirm the prediction

Rationalising territorially dispersed consumption: the projects of Fernand Courtoy for the electricity production and distribution of Belgium

The electrification of the notoriously dispersed urbanization patterns of Belgium was a complex and confused operation. The superposition of a nationwide industrial framework, consisting of large elements such as coal basins and sea ports, and a territory characterized by a very fragmented and functionally diverse spatial structure, led to the appearance of electricity in all sorts of locations following diverse arrangements. Within fifty years, large-scale industrial self-producers, regional electricity companies, provincial projects, urban municipal companies and small-scale local initiatives brought electricity to every part of Belgium, barely guided by a national policy. Within this disordered context, Fernand Courtoy occupied a very particular and somewhat exceptional position. As electrical engineer and shareholder of a local electricity company he was able to rationalize the electricity supply, first within his company (1911), and soon after in the entire industrial city of Liege (1919). Later, he became the driving force behind the establishment of the association of industrial self-producers (1922) and founded a consultancy firm that developed electricity plans for private companies as well as strategies for the electrification of whole provinces. Moreover, Courtoy was able to put his mark on the 1927 governmental commission that investigated the organization of an efficient electricity supply on the national scale. As the report of this commission proved to be too controversial for the strongly divided electricity sector, few of its propositions were realized. Nonetheless, through the debate provoked by the commission and through the numerous projects undertaken by his firm, Courtoy was able to introduce a perspective which was rather unusual for the Belgian context, combining large-scale rationalization with the national economic policies of dispersion. The paper discusses the various ways in which his plans searched for an efficient electricity supply, while recognizing the generalized availability of electricity as a necessary condition for Belgium’s distributed model of industrialization

Higher order Maass forms

We determine the size of spaces of higher order Maass forms of even weight for cofinite discrete subgroups of PSL(2,R) with cusps. If exponential growth at the cusps is allowed, the spaces of Maass forms of a given order are as large as algebraic constrictions allow. We show the analogous statement for the spaces of holomorphic forms. For functions on the universal covering group of PSL(2,R) we introduce the concept of generalized weight. For the resulting spaces of higher order Maass forms with even generalized weight we show that the size is maximal