Regional LRT as a backbone for the peri-urban landscape: Research by design on an intermodal public transport network

Public transport and the periphery have a troubled relation. In search for a more sustainable mobility, the idea of re-shaping the city is more appealing than the idea of re-shaping public transport. Public transport for the ‘car-oriented’ periphery is considered utopian, with a lack of density as the knockdown argument. The Belgian region of Flanders certainly seems to prove this. An inefficient bus network covers almost the entire territory, but only 15% of its costs. Two types of public transport have remained somewhat successful: the train connections between cities and the bus lines within cities. The periphery, in which mobility is situated on an in-between scale remains dependant on the car. Is public transport for suburbia an impossible task? New concepts such as Light-Rail Transit (LRT) and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) have emerged over the last decades. They blur the lines between classic PT concepts, and are able to adapt themselves to the structure of the contemporary city. The region of Klein-Brabant is a typical peri-urban nebula, lacking a legible structure. The difficulty of defining this specific spatial condition, requires planners to propose a new spatial vocabulary for this type of territory. This research-by-design shows how the infrastructure of a regional public transport system (LRT) can become the backbone of Klein-Brabant after the sprawl. From a theoretical point of view, intermodality has a great potential, as it increases the number of possible connections exponentially. In reality however, organizational issues prevent peripheral public transport networks from functioning as a real ‘network’. The assumption of overcoming these issues allows to discover the spatial potential of intermodality. It stimulates the nodal function of a station in a network, expanding its role as a carrier of (sub)urban programs. In Flemish planning practices, many master plans for small-scale station areas are currently being developed by municipalities, trying to enlarge their capacity as an urban center by transforming their mobility nodes. The relevance of a light rail network for Klein-Brabant is to a great extent related to the dispersed urbanity of the region. This kind of network functions through a large number of nodes at a small scale. These nodes ground the concept of mobility, making it tangible on a specific location, and within a network their role is increasingly important. Public transport thus gives way to nodal development, as a sustainable alternative to the ribbon development along secondary roads. The paper elaborates on a specific scenario for LRT implementation, namely heavy to light rail transformation, as part of a bigger research by design. Spatial morphologies are tested and proposed through this scenario. This design proposal is part of an ongoing research project, called ORDERin’F (Organizing Rhizomic DEvelopment along a Regional pilot network in Flanders).

Publication year:2012

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