Another Geography of the Belgian Dispersed Settlements

Vanneste, Guillaume [UCL]

Urbanisation and human settlements occur through division and appropriation of land, soil, ground. The thesis is interested on this process and how it challenges the question of limits, particularly outside the compact city, in dispersed territory, where other logics of construction are building what might be defined as a city-territory, an urban region where elements of the compact city are implanted through rationalities which requires specific description and representation to be understood. Within this perspective, this article aims at providing some understanding on dwellings in Belgian city-territory, the way they were built in relation with land acquisition and driven by model and imaginaries in search for implicit qualities of natural environment but are constructing, on the contrary, a non-sustainable territory. The first chapter will introduce the question of division of the ground as a territorialised appropriation by human and society. Then we try to understand the value of those patterns, private or common, and what type of ecology they support. Pointing out the historical construction of the territory in the case of Belgium and its theoretical fundaments in urbanism, we finally try to sum up alternative appropriation of territory based on current and past discourses or experiments. The paper is an attempt to endorses some statements about question of land and its reedition deepening the idea of another geography based on ground’s existing lines to support alternative appropriations.