Just Before The Crime

Botanical Traces in Pre-construction-site Photographs from Belgian Building Permits (1960s) for a Critical Lens on Construction Nature

Tom Broes, Laurence Heindryckx, Michiel Dehaene, and Rika Devos

This essay examines a corpus of Belgian photographs from the 1960s, originally produced as part of building permit applications, which depict ostensibly “empty” peri-urban fields prior to development. By reinterpreting these images as inadvertent botanical archives, the article advances an argument for embedding ecological knowledge within the administrative practices governing construction. In doing so, it challenges the conventional opposition between urbanization and nature, proposing instead that cities be understood as co-produced ecosystems—even at the scale of the individual building plot.

This essay examines a corpus of 1960s Belgian pre-construction photographs retrieved from building permit applications by major construction firms such as Etrimo, Amelinckx, and GB-Entreprises. Originally intended to document existing site conditions for administrative assessment, these images depict apparently “empty” peri-urban fields on the verge of transformation by mass housing and retail development. Yet, when viewed through a contemporary ecological and botanical lens, these photographs reveal far more than absence. They inadvertently register the spontaneous vegetation, soil conditions, and hydrological traces of pre-urban landscapes—functioning as unintended ecological archives of sites just before their erasure by concrete urbanization.

The essay situates these images within the broader post-war liberal approach to Belgian urbanism, in which zoning laws and administrative routines treated open land as already built. The photographic demonstration of emptiness served to legitimize urban expansion, reducing complex living ecologies to ‘red-zoned’ building land. In parallel, however, a different intellectual movement was emerging: urban botanists such as Paul Duvigneaud and Herbert Sukopp were documenting spontaneous urban vegetation, interpreting it as evidence of ecological resilience and adaptation within the city. The visual resemblance between their scientific surveys and the bureaucratic permit photographs highlights a missed encounter between construction and ecological knowledge.

By reinterpreting these administrative images as ‘pre-crime-scene photography’ of nature before destruction, the essay invites a rethinking of building practices. It argues for the inclusion of ecological assessment and botanical expertise in everyday planning and construction procedures, suggesting that such integration could have fostered more balanced relationships between construction and nature. Instead of viewing the city as an artefact opposed to nature, the text proposes a vision of cities as co-constructed ecosystems, formed through an ongoing interplay of human, material, and nonhuman agencies.

Ultimately, the essay calls for a radical ecological re-imagination of the act of city-building though a shift from planning to “planting,” from zoning to cultivating, and from extraction to symbiosis. It envisions an urban culture where construction becomes an act of ecological co-production—re-grounded in knowledge of soil, vegetation, and the living dynamics of the urban field.