Author:

Keywords:

Transit Oriented Development, Regional Public Transport, Belgium, Research by Design, Light Rail Transit, Infrastructure Urbanism

Abstract:

By its very etymology, infrastructure forms the basic framework for the city. As a sustainable alternative to the car, classic public transport concepts concentrate on connections within and between city centers. However, in comparison to the car, which is a strong symbol of – or perhaps the driving force behind – the individualized society, public transport lost its relevance in the diluted fabric of the contemporary city; ‘mass’ transit still relies on high-density group-based travel behavior. While the utopia of the car got debunked over the last decades, caught between congestion and pollution, new PT concepts with the ability to adapt themselves to a peri-urban spatial structure emerged, such as Light-Rail Transit (LRT) and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) – to blur the lines between classic public transport concepts. The region of Klein-Brabant is a typical peri-urban nebula. Its urbanization pattern imposes constraints on transportation. Firstly, because the region is enclosed by bigger cities public transport in Klein Brabant lacks a logic of its own; it is merely an overlap of different city-based systems. Secondly, LRT requires a critical mass to operate efficiently. As the region consists mainly of spread-out urbanization, this critical mass is not concentrated on axes. Thirdly, the historically grown settlement pattern is closely linked to the network of secondary roads. The resulting mesh that is too dispersed and small-scaled for a regional public transport network to operate in. An analysis of the existing PT network shows that the prevalent concept of centripetal mobility does not match criss-cross travel behavior. A new regional network could take into account both the scale and the structure of the region, with intermodal exchange and nodal development around stops. The housing pattern in this urbanized region seems to have a very distinctive characteristic: on the smallest scale, that of the house and the street, a rural quality predominates. The challenge is to generate a quality in mobility without compromising this quality in living. Reorganizing the peri-urban landscape allows for hidden layers in the landscape to resurface and new landscape structures to emerge. In fact, a new network in itself is a linear structure in the landscape; just as it is a backbone for development, LRT can become a framework for the landscape. The paper addresses the results of an international workshop. These design proposals are part of an ongoing research project, called ORDERin’F (Organizing Rhizomic DEvelopment along a Regional pilot network in Flanders).