2017 - 2

Inhoud

Koenraad Danneels, Bruno Notteboom en Greet De Block
Snelwegontwerp tussen natuur en stad. René Pechère en het Groenplan

Reinoud Vermoesen
Suburbs en klachten. Burgerlijke vorderingen in stad Aalst en haar buitenwijken tijdens de periode 1750-1800

Werk in uitvoering

Jelten Baguet en Janna Everaert
Onderzoek naar de stedelijke politieke elites van Antwerpen (1400-1550) en Gent (1500-1600)

Review

Heidi Deneweth, Greet de Block, Thomas Delpeut, Hannelore Franck, Hilde Greefs, Jeannette Kamp, Sanne Muurling, Ilja Van Damme, Maartje van Gelder, Arie van Steensel en Antoon Vrints
Stadsgeschiedenis in buitenlandse tijdschriften (2016)

Chantal Kesteloot
Steden in oorlog. Een geschiedenis via de fotografie

Abstracts

Koenraad Danneels, Bruno Notteboom en Greet De Block, Highway design between nature and the city: René Pechère and the Green Plan
After the Second World War, the construction of large scale road infrastructure in Belgium became an essential instrument in the construction of the welfare state. In the wake of the quantum leap of road constructions in the 1950s, the Ministry of Public Works was eager to mitigate the impact of the road projects on the environment by issuing the ‘Green Plan’. In this article, we argue that this landscape policy was not just a way of reducing the problematic effects of the infrastructure project, but rather a possibility to create a modern infrastructural landscape where oppositions between city and nature would make place for a hybrid conception of the territory. Réné Pechère, an advisor of the Green Plan and a renowned landscape architect, was the key figure who injected landscape rationales within a discourse largely dominated by engineers. A close reading of Pechère’s writings and designs on the one hand, and an analysis of the connections he had with German engineering, on the other, reveals the relationship between the logic of infrastructure and that of the garden in the Belgian Highway project.

Reinoud Vermoesen, Suits and suburbs. Small claims in town and suburbs (Aalst 1750-1800)
This contribution covers two research topics. The recent upswing in studies on the accessibility of civil law courts in early modern Western-Europe is combined with research on the role of suburbs as part of the urban landscape. Based on 2.510 small claims dating from the second half of the eighteenth century and instituted before the bench of the aldermen of the Flemish small town of Aalst, the relations between townsmen and suburbanites are sketched. The article shows that, although both (heterogenic) groups were equal in size, urban plaintiffs far outnumbered those from the suburbs. It is argued that the lower social groups and the migrants of the suburbs in particular lacked the entitlements to access the urban bench of aldermen. Furthermore, notwithstanding the important relations between both entities, it could be concluded that two different kinds of local economies were in place.