The Rampart, The Traffic Artery, and the Park; Designing for the city regions of Antwerp
Through a close reading of Antwerp’s current spatial and socio-economic composition, and the introduction of the interplay between the city’s three defining paradigms – abstracted to ‘The Rampart, the Traffic Artery, and the Park’ – this study tries to sketch a unifying strategy for Antwerp’s metropole. A strategy that embeds residential, economic, cultural, recreational, climatic, and historical motives within the different city regions. Thereby improving the connection between the left and right side of the river; transitioning the suburban region to a more polycentric structure while maintaining a spatial relation to the city; and explicitly manages the horizontal growth of the periphery. But that most importantly, captures the metropole in a single narrative from its inner-city to its outer edges. Graduation thesis prepared for the master’s degree in urban design at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
Through a close reading of Antwerp’s current spatial and socio-economic composition, and the introduction of the interplay between the city’s three defining paradigms – abstracted to ‘The Rampart, the Traffic Artery, and the Park’ – this study tries to sketch a unifying strategy for Antwerp’s metropole. A strategy that embeds residential, economic, cultural, recreational, climatic, and historical motives within the different city regions. Thereby improving the connection between the left and right side of the river; transitioning the suburban region to a more polycentric structure while maintaining a spatial relation to the city; and explicitly manages the horizontal growth of the periphery. But that most importantly, captures the metropole in a single narrative from its inner-city to its outer edges.
Graduation thesis prepared for the master’s degree in urban design at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
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shows a design approach that is hands-on in the sense that it can solve or alleviate
contemporary problems in the city of Antwerp, like the development of
the polycentric structure, or assist the city in becoming more climate resilient.
However, it can also speak to the imagination of the inhabitants of the city, due
to its ability to connect the different regions of the city in a larger narrative.
Point of attention here should go to that the use of a design approach
that includes the articulation of certain components inherently leads to a
biased look while designing. The strategy in this research was actively trying
to establish an interplay between the set, even when one component of the
set was not present in a particular region. While the strategy was rooted in a
careful reading of the existing structures of all the city regions, the established
interplay between the set might have been too forced at times.
The analyses and strategies elaborated in this study mainly operate on a system’s
level; abstracting large scale ecological and socio-economic structures.
Nevertheless, the plans elaborated in this thesis are spatially more tangible
than what one might expect from strategic urban planning. The main carrier of
this is the drawing method applied throughout the analyses and strategies. By
using aerial photographs of the respective city regions as the underlays for the
drawings, the abstract ecological, socio-economic, or infrastructural systems,
are linked to their spatial manifestations in the physical reality of Antwerp’s
metropolitan region. The drawings are able to cater to the level of abstraction
- or manoeuvring space - needed to devise a strategy of this scale, while
simultaneously allowing for a more tangible, conceptual exploration of the
physical implications of the interventions the strategy proposes. It thereby, gains
the ability to mediate between the disciplines of regional planning (planologie
in Dutch) and (the peripheral spectrum of) urban design. It could, with further
research, perhaps even be employed to bridge the two.
While the effort of the strategy was to contribute to the improvement of the
existing plans for the city of Antwerp, it has touched upon, but mostly left out,
the intricate jurisdictional playing field that is Antwerp’s metropolitan region.
The 40+ municipalities that make up the peripheral areas and the suburbs,
and the two provinces that span the metropolitan region, make the creation of
an overarching strategy a difficult one. As we have seen with the plans of the
R2, the population quite has the ability to launch a successful counter offensive.
This combined with perhaps a historically more relaxed attitude towards
structural planning, may be the reason why no such plan exists. Nevertheless,
this should not stop the city, the region, or the province, to create large-scale
structuring (utopian, in the sense of this study) plans, especially given the
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