From Flux to Frame - by Maarten Van Acker (Paperback)

About the Book

Bridging the gap between urban planning and transport history, this book investigates the spatial impact of highways, motorways, canals, tramways, and railways on the surrounding landscape.

Book Synopsis

Daily traffic jams, discussions whenever a new infrastructure project is launched, the health debate about car emissions--the tense relationship between infrastructure and its surroundings becomes clearer to us every day. Infrastructure and urbanism seem to belong to two different worlds. While infrastructure design belongs to the domain of the engineer, urbanism is often part of the overlapping disciplines of architecture, social science, and policy studies. From Flux to Frame sets out to bridge the gap between urban planning and transport history. Maarten Van Acker investigates the spatial impact of highways, motorways, canals, tramways, and railways on the surrounding landscape by applying a new methodology that combines classical historical literature with innovative mapping techniques. The book features an abundance of previously unpublished historical illustrations of exceptional quality.

Review Quotes

"Maarten Van Acker traces the construction of the landscape in the Campine, the Coast, and the Antwerp urban region of Belgium as a hybrid composite of four layers. With a fascinating analysis of the interaction of the urban actors driving the creation of these layers, the author gives an original and deep understanding of the city as an urban territory."

"Telling the story of territorial planning and design from an infrastructural point of view while revealing different and changing meanings of infrastructure in this process on such a big scale, while embracing its complexity is a valuable methodological contribution to the field."

"This research introduces a valuable apparatus and inspiring terminology, able to bridge the current dichotomy between the disciplines of infrastructure design and urbanism."

About the Author

Maarten Van Acker is Professor of Urbanism at the University of Antwerp and an urban designer.