Another planning history. The Ten-year plna (1956-1965) for the port of Antwerp as an urbanization project

This contribution analyzes the tension between formal public planning and private parties in relation to the urbanization processes triggered by the Ten-Year plan (1956-1965) for the expansion of the port of Antwerp. Originally an infrastructure project aimed at the improvement of port facilities, this plan triggered a wide-spread urbanization process in the area to the northeast of the city of Antwerp.

Formally established as a national public works initiative, the plan was executed largely by the local authorities, in a complex institutional framework, where local and national interests sometimes conflicted. The paper will first focus on this complex institutional framework, as well as on the role of other actors, such as private enterprises, trade unions and planners and architects in the establishment of this project. Trade unions as well as local business circles played a crucial role in triggering the political decision-making process that led to the Ten-year plan. A utopian plan for the construction of satellite towns as the complement to the new industrial areas, proposed as a personal counter project by Renaat Braem, a renowned Belgian architect and former collaborator of Le Corbusier, influenced the actual urbanization process.

The latter proposal proved fruitful in counterbalancing local port and city authority interests in the economic and infrastructural dimension of the urbanization process. The proposal brought the issue of housing and the preservation of existing communities to the attention of national government officials, which in turn led to a more balanced and integrated urbanization process. This process was mainly guided by independent public and private housing developers as well as by individual home-builders, within a very limited and selective framework outlined by formal government-led planning. As such, public infrastructure construction appears as a strategic project that triggers a much wider urbanization process. It successfully introduced a limited and selective framework -the infrastructure backbone- onto which a largely privately led urbanization process took place.

In this sense the case study is illustrative for the particular urbanism and urbanization history of Belgium in the post war years, as compared to some of its immediate neighbors such as France and the Netherlands, where a much more thoroughly pursued and encompassing national public planning effort determined post war urbanization. In the Belgian case, formal spatial planning occupied a much less prominent role with a much greater role for private parties in the urbanization process. This particular 'Belgian' approach relies on the practice of strategic spatial projects as a steering mechanism. In that sense, it offers interesting clues for present-day debates on a greater role for private parties in planning and forms of public private partnerships.

Publication year:2008

Keywords:planning, linear city, infrastructure, port cities