NEW ALLIANCES FOR A RURBAN REGION
Peter Vanden Abeele
Ghent University – Centre for Mobility and Physical Planning,
Phone: +32-9-2644719
Hans Leinfelder
Ghent University – Centre for Mobility and Physical Planning,
Hogeschool Antwerpen – Department of Design Sciences
Phone: +32-9-2644716
Biography
Peter Vanden Abeele is engineer-architect and physical planner. He is a PhD-researcher at the Centre for Mobility and Physical Planning of the Ghent University.
Hans Leinfelder is agricultural engineer and physical planner. He is assistant at the Centre for Mobility and Physical Planning of the Ghent University. He recently finalised his PhD research on dominant and alternative planning discourses concerning agriculture and open space in a (Flemish) urbanising context.
Abstract
“In 2007 for the first time, half of the world’s population lives in cities.” This quote clearly illustrates the new dominance of the city over the countryside. But neither countryside nor city can, in the context of rapid urbanisation, be considered univocally identifiable spatial entities or concepts.
The process of urbanisation leaves us a fragmented landscape in which the traditional boundaries between centre and suburbs, between built-up areas and open space, between cities and countryside, blur into each other. The result is a hybrid spatial reality, an urban nebula or sprawl, comprised of fragments with great differences in function, accessibility, density and quality. Pure forms of city and countryside only exist as exceptions (gentrified and museum-like inner cities or well-protected nature conservation areas and national parks), as the majority of our residential landscapes are an overlay of a peripheral type of urbanity and a peripheral type of rurality.
Nevertheless, today the predominant planning policy considers city and countryside as antipoles clearly dividing them by limiting the urban areas with demarcation lines and zoning plans. This discourse ignores the numerous gradients between city and countryside, which are so determining for urbanising landscapes worldwide. But furthermore it ignores the possible qualities which are generated throughout these juxtaposed tapestry-like landscapes. Therefore this paper discusses a new discourse for urbanised and urbanising regions. Instead of zoning these apparently conflicting programmes (urban being highly dynamic, accessible, artificial and built-up; rural being slow, inaccessible, natural and open) in separate areas, we should aim at interrelating them based on common functional characteristics. This has potential for both systems. It could introduce environmental qualities into the city and consumers into the countryside, generating new qualities for a larger region. This paper proposes a new alliance between city and countryside, namely the RURBAN REGION.
Urban? Rural?
In 2008, the world will reach an invisible but momentous milestone: for the first time in history more than half its human population will be urban (UNFPA, 2007, p1). This however does not imply that we all live in vast mega-cities like Tokyo, Buenos Aires or Lagos. On the contrary, the majority of the world population and the bulk of its growth will take place in smaller cities, in networks of cities and towns, in urban regions and in peri-urban areas. However, when we consider these new ‘types’ of urbanisation, it is becoming harder and harder to indicate them as urban.
Urban growth, the space taken up by urban localities, is increasing even faster than the urban population itself. Between 2000 and 2030, the urban population worldwide is expected to increase by 72%, while the built-up areas of cities could increase by 175% (UNFPA, 2007, p45). Historically the growth of urban areas was linked to the increase of urban population but recent phenomena indicate new drivers for urban growth. In the European Union, urban population growth is not expected to follow global tendencies, as it has already a large urban population (today approximately 75% and by 2020 approximately 80% (EEA, p5)). The urban built-up areas however will continue to grow rapidly, fuelled by a mix of socio-economic forces, like increased accessibility and transportation means, the price of urban land and inner city problems, individual housing preferences and lifestyles, demographic evolutions and growth of number of households, the increased recreational needs and the attractiveness of the countryside. More than a quarter of the European Union’s territory has now been directly affected by urban land use (ibid., p10). The growth of the built-up areas in the EU has reached its peak in 1950s-1960s (when suburbanisation rapidly took off with the increase of car-ownership). In subsequent decades the wave of urban growth has moved further away from the cities centres allowing urban sprawl to extend the urban footprint into the adjacent countryside (Antrop, 2004). The extension of urban areas will evidently claim productive agricultural land and will encroach upon important ecosystems (UNFPA, 2007, p45). Urbanisation is rapidly consuming space and resources and as a result, the urban footprint (e.g. the spatial impact regarding the needed resources, water, emissions, food, mobility, waste, …) stretches well beyond the immediate vicinity of cities. Consequently, more than half of the city lies outside of cities.
Until recently, almost everyone thought the distinction between rural and urban environments was clear and unambiguous. Rural environments used to be sparsely settled places characterized by low densities and sparse distribution of economic activities (Rocco, 2007). Rural environments could also be defined as places in which agriculture controls the economical, social as well as the political life and determines the predominant land use (Ryckewaert, 2002). Urban Areas, or cities, were centres of all sorts of economical, cultural and political activities. These are places with high population and building densities. Density seems to be the most reoccurring criterion, as a characteristic of space, to indicate whether a region is rural or urban. The OECD (organisation for economic co-operation and development) uses a density of 150 inhabitants/km2 as a threshold value between urban and rural (OECD, 1994). This criterion is widely used and allows international comparison between different regions. The rather arbitrarily chosen threshold value however poses problems in densely populated areas. Large parts of North-Western Europe would, according to this criterion, have no rural areas at all, strongly in contrast to local perception. The amount or percentage of built-up space (building-index) often is used as an alternative.
Towards a landscape of mixed urbanity and rurality.
In light of the ongoing fragmentation by built-up structures and surfaces, the criteria of density seem insufficient to give an insight in the underlying processes, driving forces or initiators of recent urbanisation processes. The case of Belgium (approx. 32500 km2, 10,5 mil. inhabitants, density of 323 inh./km2) and more specific the region of Flanders (approx. 13500 km2, 6 mil. inhabitants, density of 444 inh./km2) illustrates this strikingly. According to the OECD criteria the entire region of Flanders is urban. The figures of UNFPA (2006) confirm this: 97% of the Belgian population is urban, making it the most urbanised country in the world after city-states as Hong Kong and Singapore. The spatial reality in Flanders is however much more diverse, and certainly not identifiable and explainable as urban.
Successive waves of (sub)urbanisation, starting from the industrialisation of the countryside by the mid nineteenth century, have rendered the clear Christaller-like pattern of cities, towns and villages closely intertwined with the agricultural system, into a hardly definable and extremely fragmented urban tissue. In a first urbanisation wave, the industrialisation increased the need for housing for the working class. Instead of building large quantities of workmen’s houses next to the city centre, the Belgian government invested heavily in transportation networks of tram and railways and in subsidising the individual house in the countryside. Together with the slow growth of the cities, the countryside slowly became a residential area. This process speeded up after WWII. The economical boom of the sixties provided every family with a car and the desire for a modern, comfortable and well-equipped house. With the increased mobility and the creation of a very dense highway system, housing estates spread rapidly at an increasing distance from the city. As a result, the population of Flanders is now housed in a ‘nebular city’, a dispersed but rather homogeneous urban form. This pattern no longer has anything in common with the original culturally embedded rural settlement structure of villages and hamlets. After the suburbanisation of housing, the working places, offices, shopping and recreational facilities also started to leave the city (for an in-depth historical analysis of the urbanisation process we refer to: De Decker, 2005, De Meulder, e.a., 1999, De Meulder e.a., 2002, …).
As a consequence of these transformation processes a pattern is emerging within the urbanising region, in which previously clear morphological and functional distinctions between inner cities, suburbs, small towns and the surrounding countryside blur into one hybrid and undetermined spatial reality in which predominantly urban functions, services and infrastructures are dispersed and fragmented throughout the region. At the edge of most cities in Flanders, it is no longer possible to distinct the (morphological) elements of the settlement pattern. Open space remains in an important degree present in these areas, but is fragmented by the buildings (ribbon villages, town centres, housing estates, dispersed buildings, …), infrastructures (roads, railroads, power lines, …) or by the dilution of all sorts of activities and functions (housing, recreation, services, commerce, industry, …). These areas are defined as Built-up Peripheral Landscapes (Ministry of the Flemish Community, 1997). Garreau (1991) uses the notion of Edge City to describe the numerous clusters of small-scaled commercial and public activities while Lang (2003) uses the notion of Edgeless Cities. Sieverts (2001) uses the term Zwischenstadt: a new polycentric urban structure, which no longer can be described as urban or rural. Bruegmann (2006) defines it as Sprawl: ‘low density, scattered urban development without systematic large-scale or regional public land use planning’.
Gradually, the familiar images and notions of city, town, village and countyside are taken down. A permanent isotropic peripheral condition dominates. It is peripheral because large areas of the countryside no longer have an equivocal structure or basis, and it is isotropic because this condition is essentially the same everywhere. They dangle between town and countryside (De Meulder e.a., 1999, p. 91). As a result the distinction between city and countryside seems obsolete. The countryside comprises farms and agricultural land, as well as suburbanized towns, large scale recreational infrastructures, (para-agrarian) industrial estates and ribbon villages with all sorts of commercial and economical activities. The urbanising landscape should therefore better be considered a field or continuum instead of a dichotomy. Consequently, the classical concepts of “city/urban” (and as its counterpart “countryside/rural”) no longer seem applicable to describe the ongoing urbanisation.
Pure forms of city and countryside still exist, but the majority of the Flemish (or Northwestern European) territory is an overlap of a peripheral type of urbanity and a peripheral type of rurality. City and countryside can be considered as two ideals (Jackson, 1986), which, in their purest form, no longer exist in Flanders. Fragments of these antipoles are spread in the Flemish landscape. De Boeck and De Geyter (2002) suggest that the division between city and countryside is being replaced by the simultaneous presence of both in the same space.
Nebular city, network city, dispersed city, diluted city, città diffusa, città fractale, edge city, edgeless city, ville émergente, ville-territoire, ville-campagne, ville-nature, … Numerous neologisms are being devised to describe the urban(ising) landscape in Flanders and worldwide which have been emerging since the first phases of suburbanisation at the beginning of the twentieth century. An oxymoron is the common characteristic of all these neologisms, because they combine the concept of city (commonly described as indicated above as densely populated and compact) with a characteristic, that expresses the opposite, namely territorial, open, vague, … (Borret, 2002, p. 244). It also clearly indicates a paradox in the research on urbanisation. On the one hand, all concepts clearly use the opposition of city and countryside by combining these two elements into a new concept. By doing so the classical tradition in urbanism and planning continues and society still is divided in an urban and rural part. On the other hand, these new concepts illustrate, by stressing the contamination of city and surrounding region, the impossibility to divide space and society (Zaman & Vandaele, 2007). If opposites merge together to compose a new concept, then it is evident that we need to rethink the classical theoretical frame for researching the city (countryside) and urbanisation.
City and countryside as antipoles
Yet, the dominant planning discourse regarding the ongoing development (urbanisation) of the territory still considers city and countryside as antipoles. A planning discourse can be seen as a coherent entity of thoughts on the spatial organization of city and countryside (Hidding, 1998). The principle is based on the idea that the relation between city and countryside is the product of human thoughts and actions. These thoughts and actions are currently dominated by an antipole discourse in which city and countryside are considered as two clearly separate entities. This discourse however makes abstraction of the various gradients between city and countryside, which are the result of successive waves of urbanisation and which are so determining for the Northwestern European landscape.
This discourse is in Flanders and The Netherlands institutionalised in a spatial policy, which aims to reinforce urban developments and limit new developments in the countryside.
The Spatial Structure Plan Flanders (Ruimtelijk Structuurplan Vlaanderen, RSV) introduces the phrase ‘Flanders, Open and Urban’ as a vision for its spatial development. The plan opts to pursue an urban policy in areas, that have a predominant urban character (large and medium-sized cities) and an open space policy in areas, that have a predominantly rural character (the countryside) (Ministry of the Flemish Community, 1997, p317). Regarding the ongoing urbanisation, the plan uses the concept of the deconcentrated clustering which aims to cluster the future spatial development of Flanders according to the existing deconcentrated pattern of urbanisation and the dynamics of the land use. The goal is to counter the unbridled suburbanisation and fragmentation of space and thus decreasing the urban pressure on the rural areas. (ibid., p321) In order to implement this vision, the instrument of the urban demarcation line is introduced. This line separates the urban areas from the rest of the territory. Within this boundary, an urban policy is to be maintained. The urban form and function has to be strengthened by increasing building density, by filling in the open spaces within the urban tissue and by concentrating typically ‘urban’ functions like shopping, services, offices and working-places. The spatial policy towards the countryside seems to base itself on the opposition against the urban and economical concentrations. The RSV defines the countryside of Flanders as areas in which open (unbuilt) space dominates. A clear indication that the open space planning policy regards the countryside as being rural. Within the countryside, specific zones with ecological values (Flemish Ecological Network, Ramsar and Habitat Directive Areas, …), landscape values (Anchor Places, Historical Landscapes, Relic Zones, …), or hydrological values (Naturally Inundatable Areas) are delineated and received a protective status.
The Fifth Memorandum on Physical Planning (Vijfde Nota Ruimtelijke Ordening) in the Netherlands is based on more or less the same principles. The memorandum introduces a zoning system consisting of red and green contours. The aim of these contours is to counter the wasteful use of space by reducing urban expansion (red contour) and to safeguard extremely valuable areas from change, like valuable ecosystems and landscapes (green contour).
The division into urban and rural areas, clearly identifiable in both policy documents, seems traditional and, keeping in mind the fragmented spatial condition, rather voluntaristic. It expresses the belief in the possibility to restore a hierarchical settlement pattern. Fragmentation of space is considered reversible and demarcation seems the preferred and most suitable strategy to do so (Van den Broeck, 2000). But how do demarcation lines and contours work? The demarcation lines focus mainly on the distinction between the two sides of the line. On the one hand the urban areas and networks are delineated (red/urban contour), on the other hand valuable nature preservation areas and traditional landscapes are delineated. The lines between urban and rural make a distinction based on function. On the one side of the line, a particular function is allowed, on the other side, it is not. Therefore, they are classic zoning instruments born out of an Anglo-Saxon planning tradition (Sijmons, 2002). It is a clear form of authorisation planning based on zoning and on delivering (or declining) building permits. The instrument of the demarcation line works best when used to keep undesired functions out of a certain area. Therefore, it is a suitable instrument to protect or defend for example important nature conservation areas. However, the urban demarcation line does not work defensive but repressive. It aims to keep businesses, functions and people in (the urban area) that want to get out. This poses several problems in regard to the mixed urban-rural character of the Flemish or Northwestern European landscape.