The Art of Urbanization

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 (1907-1939). Against prevailing trends, Antwerp’s urban expansion was not the product of rational 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, sociocultural, political and ecological needs – 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 is presented as a generative, redistributive, reproductive, and situated worlding practice – offering a fresh perspective on urbanism that resonates in our current age of (planetary) urbanization. Tom Broes is a post-doctoral research fellow at the department of architecture and urban planning at Ghent University. This work offers an important contribution to international urban planning and urban history, as the first study of early 20th century urbanization of a Belgian city of metropolitan scale. It adds a new perspective to the extant literature by writing the history of an urbanization project that is in many ways more coherent, livable and socially inclusive than many (sub)urban environments produced by late 20th century suburbanization. - Michael Ryckewaert, Vrije Universiteit Brussel Forgotten chapter in early 20th-century European planning history, offering a fresh perspective on urbanism, grounded in a theory of urbanization 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 (1907-1939). Against prevailing trends, Antwerp’s urban expansion was not the product of rational 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, sociocultural, political and ecological needs – 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 is presented as a generative, redistributive, reproductive, and situated worlding practice – offering a fresh perspective on urbanism that resonates in our current age of (planetary) urbanization.