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.
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
built on top of the capped highway. As of yet it is still unclear how the project
has affected the property value of the existing urban fabric (the polis blog,
n.d.; West 8, 2011; de Architect, 2017).
Figure 1.40
World map of constructed and proposed
highway cap and tunnel projects
from 1960 till 2030.
The map and graph to the right shows a cross-section of the highway cap
and tunnel projects around the world from the 1960s till 2030 (projects in the
planning phase).
The list of already constructed caps and tunnels was compiled by
remote sensing of the urban fabric of major cities 17 using Google Maps –
underground highways show up in a different colour. The list of projects that
are in their planning phase was compiled using the Google search engine,
with variants on search terms like: highways cap proposal, highway covering
proposal, highway tunnel proposal, etc. The projects were subsequently
inventoried on basic characteristics (year, length, country, etc.), why they were
constructed, what has been built on top, and how the project was financed.
For the complete list of projects, see appendix I.
17.
A city with an agglomeration above
one million inhabitants.
From the graph we see that the trend of capping highways (similar to what
Antwerp is now planning on doing) started in the United States during the
mid-sixties, with Memorial Park in Los Angeles County, a cap of 200 metres.
Over the years, we see a subtle increase in length of the highway caps.
Especially European counties opt for a longer underground relocation of their
city highway. Interesting is the emergence of highway tunnels under the urban
fabric of cities around 2000, in Europe and Asia & Oceania, often around the
length of five kilometres. This seems to support the growing pessimism towards
car use from the previous paragraphs, in terms of climate and health, however
with an investment like this, it probably also means that cars will remain an
integral part of the city’s mobility system for quite some time after.
The main motives behind capping existing highways seems to be (1) creating
better connections between the two sides of the highway, (2) solving space
related issues and rising housing prices, (3) health related issues, like air and
noise pollution, (4) climate related issues, like water storage and heat stress,
(5) adding much needed green space, and (6) as means of establish the city as
a forward thinking modern city, using the highway project to attract new talent.
Once the highway has been put underground, we often see a park taking residence
on top of the cap. Only seldom do we see a building on top of the cap,
this probably has something to do with the expense it takes to build on top of
a highway (structurally). A park of course, helps in catering for public green,
the climate, and health, and it helps create a more suitable environment for
development. It should be noted that these projects are almost never done to
Figure 1.41
Graph of highway cap and tunnel
projects structured according to the
length of the underground highway
and construction year, and subdivided
according based the continent.
76
Change language