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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looks like. Because of the enthusiasm with which the highways were constructed
around the world in the sixties and seventies, many of them are in central
places in the urban fabric. With the increasing scarcity of space, many cities
are looking at these inner-city highways with hungry eyes. The last decades
have seen total removal, burying at great expense, or transitioning into boulevards
of urban highways, to improve the spatial quality, property value, and
restoring neighbourhood connections. Especially in the United States removal
has been a popular measure, highways were often constructed in a ditch here,
and many of them would have needed major refurbishment (Parker, 2012). In
Europe highways often do not directly go through the city, here the highway
often encircles the city in a ring road. Due to suburbanisation city and suburb
have often fused together, which is why they often for the underground
relocation of the ring and place boulevard on top. Other variants are reducing
the number of exits and narrowing the road or an incremental improvement
of the landscape on and around the highway; essentially creating a parkway
setting (Stapel, Top, Hanekamp, & Zandbelt, 2018, p. 35). When building new
highways, we often see that cities built them directly under ground, this can be
observed in cities like Brisbane, Sydney, Singapore, and Oslo.
The most famous highway project is probably Boston’s Big Dig. A project
constructed between 1991 and 2007, which involved the underground relocation
of a curved highway running through downtown Boston that isolated
the northern side of the city and the waterfront, and the construction of a
bypass (land and water tunnel) to East Boston on the other side of the river.
A project that was plagued by massive cost overruns (from 2,6 billion, to
15 billion, to 24 billion including interest), a delay of eight years, and a few
accidents with deathly casualties. However, the project did mostly do what it
promised to do; de traffic going through the city is still substantial, but out of
sight underground, and due to the bypass less congested then before (Flint,
2015; Sperance & Bisnow Boston, 2018). Above ground the tunnel now holds
some of the most valuable urban ground in the United States. From 2003 to
2005, the office rents along the capped highway went up by an average of
10 percent, while land prices jumped by nearly 40 percent. These land-value
increases were observed within 500 meters of the capped highway (Ascher &
Krupp, 2010, p. 195).
Another interesting example is Madrid’s covering of the M30, completed
between 2005 and 2011. A project that covers a ten km section of
Madrid’s ring running along the river Manzanares, including the full covering
of some of the intersections. Total costs of the project were 4,5 billion euros.
The overall goal of the project was to reconnect both sides to each other and
the riverfront. A large park with sporting and recreational options has been
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