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Project

From Sociobiology to Urban Metabolism. The Interaction of Urbanism, Science and Politics in Brussels (1900-1978)

Today, urbanism and urban design are engaging in a productive alliance with the natural sciences, leading to the international rise of ecological forms of urbanism. In the Brussels region, socio-ecological approaches are rethinking the urban landscape, and the turn towards landscape design as well as metabolic schemes and circular economy goals show that the region has become a telling manifestation of these evolutions. Still, the implications of these interactions remain unclear, and this dissertation therefore provides the necessary historical background to understand and critically assess today’s alliance of ecology and urbanism.

Indeed, while this use of ecology in urbanism, planning and design seems new and innovative, the history of Brussels – a crossroads of ideas and practices in urbanism – is littered with examples in which disciplinary constellations of urbanists, landscape designers, scientists and politicians created ‘ecological’ or ‘environmental’ forms of urbanism theory and prac­tice. After the First World War, urbanists and landscape architects started to design garden cities fusing urban housing and rural landscapes in the vicinity of Brussels, based on sociobiological urban theories. In the post-Second World War period highway construction centred around Brussels created possibilities for landscape designers to rethink and redesign the green structure of the city. In the 1970s, the advent of urban ecology in Brussels as a new scientific field went hand in hand with new zoning plans, rethinking the city-nature dichotomy through new regional planning policies. All these episodes of environmental forms of urbanism were created by specific historical constellations of actors working on urban questions in Brussels.

This dissertation delves into these particular episodes of Brussels’ urban history and zooms in on the work and network of three experts – urbanist Louis Van der Swaelmen, landscape architect René Pechère, and urban ecologist Paul Duvigneaud – who serve as entry points to map the alliances of disciplines that created different hybrid urbanism theories. It tracks down the different uses of ecological discourses in urbanism and unearths the political aspects of ecological urban design. This research therefore builds a critical historical reflection on ecological urbanism theory and gives insight into the ways in which socio-ecological ideas and concepts find traction and are reshaped by urban de­sign and the urban reality.

Date:15 Dec 2020 →  22 Jun 2021
Keywords:Urban history, Ecology, Brussels, Ecological Urbanism, Urban Metabolism
Disciplines:Landscape architecture history and theory, Landscape and ecological history, Regional and urban history, Modern and contemporary history, Urbanism and regional planning
Project type:PhD project