The Art of Urbanization
The Art of Urbanization re-examines a forgotten tradition in Belgian and European planning history, reconstructed through a longitudinal analysis of the Study Committee of the Antwerp Agglomeration (SCAA). Unlike the dominant pursuit of rational planning models, Antwerp’s urban expansion was not the product of master planning, but evolved gradually through collective and pragmatic responses to emerging urban questions.
Drawing on a wide range of historical sources and richly illustrated, the book reconstructs how numerous sub-plans – each addressing economic, socio-cultural, political and ecological needs – gradually coalesced into the incremental components of a reasoned and dynamic urban agglomeration.
Engaging with classical concepts in urban theory and global urban history, The Art of Urbanization substantiates a reading of urbanization as a generative, redistributive, reproductive, and situated worlding practice – offering a fresh perspective on urbanism that resonates in our current age of planetary urbanization.
Urbanization as a socio-cultural practice. © Tom Broes.
This book contributes to reconceptualizing urbanization as a (reproductive) practice rather than a (production) process. The main ambition of this book is to recollect and conceptualize the SCAA’s peculiar approach to urbanism as the Art of Urbanization–revealing the collective project behind urbanization by scrutinizing the urban questions and practices that project was made of. Urbanization is not just a process that produces roads and houses in what used to be the countryside, but entails the collective realization of all the necessary conditions that make this development possible in the first place. The book examines, among other collective arrangements, how urban societies and cities depend for their development on the material and construction industries that can build them.
The book thus contains early traces of the nexus between construction history and planning history that informs the urban track of this ‘Above and Beyond’ research project, exploring how cities and urban societies select what kind of material, and construction practices thrive and persist as part and parcel of their own development. Adopting the perspective of urbanization as an art or practice encourages to reconceptualize 'building' more broadly as 'terraforming'-meaning ‘to rearrange materials from the Earth’s biosphere and geosphere to meet the human purposes inherent in previous acts of energizing, situating and design.’ (Nightingale, Our Urban Planet). Urbanization, then, is not only the manifestation of terraforming practices but also sets the conditions in which certain practices of terraform, rather than others, can be realized.
The book project is supported by the City of Antwerp, the Universitaire Stichting, and the KULeuven fund for fair open access. It will be published by Leuven University Press, both as a physical book and open-access publication. Expected date of publication: 3 November 2025.