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Old Dispersions and

Scenes for the Production


of Public Space
The Constructive Margins of Secondarity
The density of development in Belgium is such that the entire country has
become an open city, with little sense of where one metropolitan area begins
and another ends. Bruno De Meulder describes the underlying logic of this
unbroken urbanscape, and the opportunity it affords for re-editing and
reinserting informal social spaces in areas of wasted land.

Urbanisation of rural networks


The general urbanisation of the territory is to a large extent a parasite of the pre-existing network of rural roads
which undergoes no restructuring during urbanisation. Instead the urbanisation leads to an incremental infill of
plots along rural roads unequipped for urban use. In a second phase dendrite-like structures are grafted on to
the existing network in order to disclose the second order behind the ribbon development.

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The nearly total urbanisation of the territory of Belgium


surely makes it an emblematic case in discussions about
dispersed urbanism, sprawl, citta diffusa, and so many other
terms that attempt without too much success to grasp the
reality of the contemporary urban condition. Belgium has
since unremembered time been a country of laissez faire,
where the cacophonic juxtaposition of built fragments
delivers surprise after surprise, where an intense poetry this
is Magritte territory lurks side by side with a nauseating
banality of everyday habitation. This at the same time
incredibly chaotic and urban landscape seems at first sight to
lack any coherence whatsoever. Nevertheless, a closer look
allows at least an insight into the ordering logics that
determine the continuous production and reproduction of the
seemingly chaotic territory, and eventually the development
of urban strategies to deal with it.
Factors1 that explain the unusual situation of the Belgian
territory include: the extraordinary fertility of the soil, which
gave rise to the very dense occupation of the countryside since
the early Middle Ages; a multitude of small-scale provincial
cities, usually only 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) apart; and the
intensive division of land property. The territory is
administered by a multitude of municipalities which, since
the municipal law of 1838, all have the same rights and
powers from hamlet to village to the larger city.2 This
extremely decentralised administration turned the territory
into an archipelago of municipalities which themselves are a
mosaic of the small land properties that underwent a
continuous process of further division through inheritance
law. Given the general laissez faire attitude, and consequently
the absence of any centrally imposed town-planning
regulations, the bulk of development takes the form of
incremental, piecemeal additions or transformations.
Development equals incremental mutation.
This general and uncoordinated urbanisation of the
territory was fuelled by two main Belgian characteristics: a
prevalent and persistent anti-urban catholic ideology (which
also implied a resistance to any centralisation of power), and
the implementation, step by step, of incredibly dense,
nationwide networks of different complementary
infrastructures (canals, national roads, railways, tramways
and, after the Second World War, express roads and highways).3
While the catholic ideology promoted home ownership in the
municipality of origin, the density, completeness and
accumulation of this different nationwide network created in
a certain way a universal accessibility for each spot of the
territory. The unification of the national territory resulted in
a unified national land, housing and labour market. Each spot
embodied the same accessibility and, consequently, in the
long run an equal development potential that ultimately led
to an isotropic condition (which might be considered as a zero
degree of redistributive democracy). Everywhere on the
periphery of the capital city or in remote hamlets an
emerging, permanent type of urbanity was generated,
juxtaposing housing, industry and commerce, which spread

over the whole territory. This urbanity has generally never


consolidated it is permanently emerging given the
mismatch between the disclosed development potential and
the effective development capacity required.
This process of unification and equalisation distorted the
traditional settlement pattern, and broke the monopoly of the
city as the centre of production and consumption,
concentration of labour, population, economical and political
power, as a forum of public debate, and so on. Put simply, it
eroded the notion of centrality. In terms of development
potential, any crossroads of two national roads, a train
station, tramway stop or a highway exit acquired the same
competitive advantage as the traditional city. Both centre and
periphery vanished and were replaced by an almost
omnipresent secondarity.4 Historic cities became merely
insignificant relicts in the isotropic territorial continuum
where industry (dense networks of flexible small- and
medium-sized enterprises), commerce, residence and
agriculture negligently cohabitate.
Conventional wisdom condemns this secondarity as a
burden, as it does not allow economies of scale, and nor does
it generate the synergies that concentration and accumulation
allow. Because it remains dispersed, incremental and
unconsolidated, it does not create any significant public
space, nor an established (hegemonic) order. On the other
hand, this absence of rules and norms, this generalised
condition of secondarity5 in opposition to primarity6
generates an ambiguous space. It creates an open city, an
embryonic territorial constellation that always remains
receptive. Its continuously reproduced undefinedness renders
permanent its character of wasteland, a terrain whose
potentiality is unconsumed.
In concrete terms, the combination of a sustained
generalised dispersion and a permanently emerging urbanity
gave rise to the formation of recurrent tissue figures in the
territory: the isolated terraced house in the middle of
nowhere; the notorious corner with (by now closed/shut
down) pubs at the tramway stop; the commercial ribbon
development along national roads;7 the ribbon fragment
along whatever road; the oversized and only half-developed
perimeter block8 that results from urbanisation without any
urbanistic restructuring of former rural road networks, and so
on. Over the last decade, plots varying in size, quality and
character (residential, industrial, commercial) have been
filling in the remaining open meshes of the multitude of
urbanised nets that cover the territory.
As a result, most of the spatial patterns are endless
recombinations of the aforementioned figures, creating such
a redundant variety that the territory becomes isotropic,
undefined by over-definition.
Since practically no sites have consolidated and become
primary land, they remain permanently emerging. The
landscape by definition becomes the defective interplay of
simultaneous and contradictory landscape forms: urban and
rural, yet, due to the negligent/secondary urbanisation

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OSA, Atlas Southwest Flanders, 2002: Ferraris


1777 map of Ypres, West Flanders, and the
surrounding area
The late medieval territory here is intensively
occupied. The countryside is characterised by a
dense network of evenly distributed farms of
relatively small scale, with a very fine division of
the land and a large number of cities, often less
then 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) apart. The cities
often with crossroads between river and road
create centralities that appear as an
archipelago of cities in a sea of intensively
exploited and very fine-mazed rural territory.

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Territory of West and East Flanders: from archipelago to rhizome (17702000)


From the 18th century onwards, a dense network of national roads, railways, tramways, highways and
expressways is superimposed on this territory. The proliferation of crossroads, stations, tramway stops,
exits on highways and so on distorts the spatial structure of the territory, as each of the crossroads creates
an equal accessibility and is hence a potential point of centrality. The archipelago of cities mutates in a
heavily infrastructured rhizome of secondary centres, and a territory of secondarity is generated.

Oversized perimeter blocks,


Wevelgem, West Flanders
Over time, this parasitic incremental
urbanisation process leads to the
formation of redundant figures in the
landscape, such as the well-known
ribbon development and oversized
perimeter blocks with their ever
expanding dimensions. In a second
phase the second order behind the
ribbons is sometimes filled in with
additions, garages, warehouses,
industrial buildings or, in recent
decades, with allotments that
consume the last of the open space.
This leads to an urban landscape in
which conglomerate and template
coexist as morphological principles.

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OSA: Atlas Southwest Flanders, 2004: Buda intimacy/exposurepublic/private


The urban fabric that is generated by rather ad hoc and unconsidered infill, construction, demolition, reconstruction, and so
on leads to a large variety of open spaces with very different relationships to the private constructions. This unordered,
chaotic juxtaposition of open spaces offers on the one hand all conceivable gradients between public and private space, and
on the other opens up a register of spaces ranging from extremely exposed to intimate. A re-editing allows the articulation
and exploitation of this richness of open-space qualities as what is conventionally only seen as residual space.

process, a lot of residual landscape fragments. These are


neither urban nor rural, waste(d) lands that hopelessly try to
mediate between different scales, conflicting functions,
contradictory qualities and spatial paradigms: ribbon
development versus allotment, traditional building block
versus Modernist composition, urban versus rural,
conglomerate versus template, and so on.
In this territory, with its zero degree of spatial quality,
wave after wave of development deposited a layer of urban
material to the point where the whole territory was
covered/urbanised in one way or another.
The urbanistic project consequently becomes an intertextual work of re-editing (a weak embryonic) text. The
projects presented here, by OSA (the University of Leuvens
Research Group for Urbanity and Architecture), attempt such
a re-editing exercise in Southwest Flanders.9 They attempt to
use new development to insert minimal spatial qualities,
necessary structures and missing public spaces, while at the
same time avoiding an overdose of structuring and definition,
which would eventually destroy the fundamental quality of
the open city Belgium has become, including the protodemocratic character of its spatial constellation. By no means
do they aim for a comprehensive requalification of the
territory. However, they do focus on potential sites of
condensation (in the sense of subconcentration and
precipitation the fallout of new material) that allow
articulation, relief and contrast, and are, in one way or

Buda block/element
The urban fabric is generated by ad hoc infill along ribbons and the
unconsidered induction of freestanding, large-scale buildings often in a first
order/second order relation.

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another, intended to substructure the open city mainly via the


introduction of public spaces of a new kind. They are not
programmatic programmes are usually interchangeable
anyway but try to use the interstices between production
and reproduction to re-create ambiguous spaces (public in this
case) that invite given their reaffirmed secondarity new
social practices. In the end, social practices are the sole
creators of public life, and hence public spaces.
What all of OSAs projects have in common is the search
for new types of scenes secret gardens, platforms, quays,
fields and parks that without too much emphasis invite
and facilitate new types of social interaction. They are far
from neutral, but at the same time everything but overdefined and deterministic. These open signifiers have the
ambition to unlock the latent potentiality of waste(d) land, the
latent urbanity of the open city.
In short, instead of following the mainstream discourse
on the loss of public space (it is difficult to lose something
that was never there) and the loss of urbanity (ditto) caused
by the dispersed city, the work of OSA is an urbanistic credo
that is testimony to a belief in emerging new social practices
that are enabled by the insertion of the public spaces of
tomorrow in an open city that is still only on the verge of
becoming urban. 4

Notes
1. For a more elaborated history of the Belgian urbanisation process see, for
example, Bruno De Meulder and Michiel Dehaene, Atlas Fascikel 1: Zuidelijk
West-Vlaanderen, Anno 02, Kortrijk, 2002.
2. Fernand Brunfaut, La condition municipale, Le Travail (Verviers), 1951.
3. For more detailed information see, for example, Bruno De Meulder et al,
Patching up the Belgian Landscape, Oase, 52, 1999, pp 78112.
4. Jean Remy, Ville: Ordre et violence, PUF (Paris), 1981, p 59.
5. Secondarity refers to the non-functional and irrational concretisation of a
desired spatial experience, a space that is created by processes of bricolage,
the subconscious and subversive trial-and-error production of new common
grounds.
6. Primarity characterises a condition where the production of space is
dictated by the necessities of subsistence and survival. It is a modus operandi
that assembles utilities to create efficient environments, mostly regulated by
an engineering rationality.
7. Bruno De Meulder, Lintbebouwing: Algemeen n Belgisch, SRO (86), 2005,
4, pp 403.
8. See, for example, the case study in Bruno De Meulder and Oswald Devisch,
Atlas Fascikel 3: Wevelgem, 2002.
9. The urbanistic work presented here forms part of the Atlas-project Southwest
Flanders that OSA undertakes, in collaboration with and commissioned by, the
Leiedal intermunicipal association in South Flanders. So far it includes a study of
the municipality of Wevelgem, the Buda Island project in the city of Kortrijk, the
secret gardens project on Buda Island, the redevelopment of the St Amandscollege in Kortrijk, the redevelopment of the power plant site in Zwevegem, a
landscape development strategy for the Bossuit-Kortrijk canal, a landscape
development strategy for the E17 highway in Southwest Flanders, and a study of
the Pand in Waregem. Results of this urbanistic work are published as fascicles
of the Atlas Southwest Flanders: fascicles 0, 1, 2 (on architecture); 3 Wevelgem;
4 Transformator, Project voor de Electriciteitscentrale, Zwevegem; 6 Kortrijk
Buda; 7 Gelijktijdige Landschappen, Canalscape, and so on.

Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images OSA-KULeuven

Buda secret garden


The Buda Island project exploits and articulates the coincidence of opposing
morphological logics (oversized perimeter block versus freestanding
buildings, both zero-degree versions of traditional building blocks and the
Modernist paradigm) to create a variety of open and closed spaces that are
different in character and nature, as a support for an open city, an inviting
space that can accommodate a variety of different uses and atmospheres
side by side.

Simultaneous landscapes/canalscape project


The existing infrastructure of canals, railway lines and national roads
generated the mutation of the countryside into a rhizomatic urban landscape
composed of simultaneously present landscapes (industry, urban, rural). The
project requalifies this infrastructure in a canalscape, a network of quays,
gardens, fields and forests that inscribe themselves in the netcity and in
doing so restructure the netcity and introduce spaces for public appropriation.

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