The Concrete Plant as a Terraforming Machine

This article reconstructs how the development of a dense network of concrete plants was crucial in making concrete the basic material of an urbanizing construction culture. Belgium is treated as a paradigmatic case to argue that one – perhaps the main – reason why concrete became the most dominant building material in the world was due to the intensive way in which it was distributed and made available as a self-evident consumer product. The article describes how the relentless output of horizontal rotary kilns compelled the cement industry to adopt a bold 'politics of realization' – ensuring that massive cement volumes being produced actually found their way to the market. The solution lie in the development of a dense logistics network of concrete plants that efficiently produced and delivered ready-mix concrete directly to construction sites – actively shaping urbanization regimes capable of absorbing large volumes of concrete. Spurred on by cement giants CBR (Cimenteries et Briqueteries Réunies), CO (Ciments d’Obourg) and CCB (Compagnie des Ciments Belges), together with the establishment of the BVSB (Belgian Professional Association for Ready-Mix Concrete, 1962) and the IB joint venture (Inter-Beton, 1967), this strategy was increasingly formalized.

In the fragmented Belgian urban landscape, concrete plants spread rapidly across the entire country. During the 1960s and ’70s, this new concrete regime put a veritable form of ‘terraforming’ into practice. Important material flows of sand, water and gravel were rationalized and distributed in bulk to the concrete plants in the network. From there, concrete spread across the country, driving a surge in construction —from major infrastructure to everyday urban practices—that transformed the Belgian landscape.

As Belgium’s construction recession in the late 1970s deepened into a full-blown crisis in the early 1980s, the ready-mix concrete sector was sustained through major public contracts and a strategic pivot toward specialized concrete mixes that unlocked new niche markets. In this way, the concrete plant became increasingly entrenched as an indisputable cause of Belgian urbanization’s ‘cement addiction’. By focusing on the concrete plant, the article provides a new spatial perspective on the political ecology of concrete and raises questions about the sustainability of a building culture in which the overproduction and overcon-sumption of this extractive material is a structural component.