2017 - 1

Inhoud

Pieter Leloup en Margo de Koster
Politie en veiligheid in de Antwerpse haven. Een lappendeken van publieke, private en hybride spelers en belangen, 1890-1914

Evert Vandeweghe
Overheidssubsidies voor private restauraties en historiserende nieuwbouw in drie Belgische provinciesteden: Aalst, Oudenaarde en Veurne (1875-1925)

Werk in uitvoering

Isabelle Doucet
De Belgische ‘counter’ episode, 1968-1978. Stad en architectuur tussen denken, durven en doen

Dossier: Sociale bewegingen in kleine steden en plaatsen

Bart van der Steen
Great causes and small places. Onderzoek naar sociale bewegingen in kleine steden en plaatsen

David Templin
Vrije eilanden in een zee van kleinstedelijke bedomptheid. De West-Duitse beweging voor jongerencentra tussen metropool en provincie

Peter van Dam
Van Breukelen naar Brussel. Fair trade en de transnationale vervlechting van lokaal engagement in de jaren 1960 en 1970

Bart van der Steen
De metropool voorbij. Een korte geschiedenis van kraken in Leiden in de jaren zeventig

Review

Pieter De Graef, Arie van Steensel, Jelten Baguet, Stef Espeel, Janna Everaert, Dirk Lueb, Laura May, Wout Saelens, Laurence Van Goethem, Wout Vande Sompele, Thomas Verbruggen, Boris Horemans en Iason Jongepier
Stadsgeschiedenis in Belgische en Nederlandse historische tijdschriften (2015)

Maarten Prak
Urban History Conference: een weerwoord

Abstracts

Pieter Leloup en Margo De Koster, Policing the Port of Antwerp. A patchwork of public, private and hybrid security actors and interests, 1890-1914

At the end of the nineteenth century, rising concerns about port security issues began to dominate the agenda of the Antwerp city authorities. In an effort to reduce criminal activity in general and theft in particular, several crime prevention measures were implemented in collaboration with the maritime sector. This article considers the nature, role and involvement of the public, hybrid and private (e.g. commercial) policing bodies that carried out police functions near the Antwerp waterfront. The first section explores the political, economic and criminogenic conditions of the Port of Antwerp. The second part discusses the pluralised security landscape and the various public-private policing and security bodies involved, their competences, powers and territories, their successes and failures, and their mutual interactions and relations.

 

Evert Vandeweghe, Government funding for the restoration of historical buildings and the construction of new historicized buildings in three Belgian towns: Aalst, Oudenaarde and Veurne (1875-1925)

Like in other European countries, many town centres in Belgium experienced a historical make-over from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, as a reaction to and as part of their modernization. The focus of this historicizing policy gradually shifted from large religious and profane monuments (like churches, town and meat halls) to a more inclusive historical townscape and in particular to residential architecture. The local government tried to influence this – largely private – architecture in several ways, one of which was funding the restoration of historical buildings and the construction of new historicized buildings. Whereas this policy has already been documented for exceptional places like Bruges or the Grand Place in Brussels, this article shows how it caught on in ‘ordinary’ Belgian towns like Aalst, Oudenaarde and Veurne, who was responsible and what were the determining factors.  

 

David Templin, Free islands in a sea of suburban dullness. The West German youth centre movement between metropolis and province

In the early 1970s, youths in villages and small cities formed groups and organizations with the goal of establishing self-managed youth centers. These centers offered space for youths to socialize, experiment with alternative culture and explore leftist politics in a context that excluded oversight, control or the presence of grown-ups. With the rise of the movement, political and cultural impulses of ‘1968’ reached the West German ‘provinces’. The history of the West German youth center movement introduced new lifestyles and cultural and political styles in smaller towns and villages. At the same time, its emergence was the result of changing relations between cities and villages. Researching the history of the youth center movement is important, because it offers a way to investigate the changing relations between ‘metropolis’ and ‘province’ (i.e. small cities, villages, country side dwellings) in the 1970s. Furthermore, the youth center movement illustrates how strongly this movement was influenced by its local context. Finally, the research challenges concepts that have traditionally been used to analyze urban social movements.

 

Peter van Dam, From Breukelen to Brussels. The transnational networks and local roots of fair trade activism during the 1960s and 1970s

By selling cane sugar, setting up ‘world shops’, or picketing supermarkets activists throughout Western Europe demanded fair trading conditions for people in the global South. Since the cane sugar campaign was launched in 1968 and a world shop opened its doors in Breukelen in 1969, these activists have predominantly addressed the inequality of the global market through local activism. Although their activism was aimed at the local population, they also hoped to pressure national, European, and global politics. This (trans)national perspective also impacted their own activities: a change in the global sugar market, the negotiations over the British membership in the European Economic Community or the position of a member of the Dutch government could decisively change the shape and the goals of local activism. The local was thus inextricably intertwined with the translocal – ‘Brussels’ was an integral part of activism in Breukelen. An analysis of the local commitment to fair trade in the early years of this movement shows that we can only understand the dynamics of local activism by taking its simultaneous entanglement in local, national, European, and global frameworks into account.

 

Bart van der Steen, Beyond the Metropolis. A brief history of squatting in Leiden during the 1970s

This article investigates the development of house squatting in the Dutch city of Leiden as a means to challenge stereotypical images of squatting and squatter protest in the Netherlands and beyond. Squatting continues to evoke lively images of punk youths who confront (riot) police in spectacular conflicts over occupied houses and buildings. In reality, however, the group of people who squatted was much more diverse. Researching the phenomenon of squatting in Leiden creates possibilities to both question and move beyond this image. Empirical research into squatting in Leiden uncovers a highly diverse multitude of people, while at the same time showing that most squatter actions did not end in violent confrontation. The findings also challenge stereotypes of squatting being mainly a metropolitan phenomenon, as the much smaller city of Leiden had a lively squatter history. In fact, this fact challenges us to look at how diverse the identities of squatters and practices of squatting were in larger cities. Finally, the paper illustrates how images of militant squatting influenced activists in smaller cities and towns, revealing how important these images were to activists and movements at that time.