The Art of Urbanization reexamines a forgotten tradition in Belgian and European planning history, reconstructed through a longitudinal analysis of the Study Committee of the Antwerp Agglomeration. Unlike the dominant pursuit of rational planning models, Antwerp’s urban expansion was not the product of master planning, but evolved gradually through collective and pragmatic responses to emerging urban questions. Drawing on a wide range of historical sources and richly illustrated, the book reconstructs how numerous sub-plans – each addressing economic, socio-cultural, political and ecological needs – gradually coalesced into the incremental components of a reasoned and dynamic urban agglomeration. As it engages with classical concepts in urban theory and global urban history, The Art of Urbanization presents a generative, redistributive, reproductive, and situated worlding practice – offering a fresh perspective on urbanism that resonates in our current age of planetary urbanization.

Processes of urban expansion at the turn of the twentieth century have generally been described in terms of 'regional planning'. However, in the Belgian context, and in Antwerp more specifically, the concept of the 'agglomeration' was put to the fore rather than the 'region', and 'urbanization' was a more common practice than 'planning'. This paper shows how a 'programme of urbanization' centred on pertinent 'urban questions' shaped the contours of the Antwerp Agglomeration. In adopting this perspective of 'programmatic urbanization', the paper seeks to place the development of Antwerp extra muros within a different lineage, outside of the quest for comprehensive planning. Recomposing an eclectic catalogue of five pertinent 'urban questions', this paper investigates how and to which extent the Study Committee for the development of the Antwerp Agglomeration and its prominent engineer August Mennes, tried to master the urbanization process as it unfolded. Urbanization, then, is framed as a collective practice that generates positive agglomeration effects and surplus values that could not have been produced by individual actors. As such, the paper expands the understanding of urbanization from a random process of capital accumulation to a project that includes the building of social and cultural capital.

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.

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': lowand 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.

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.