Lijnstadontwerpen. Van de utopie naar de realiteit en weer terug

This book chapter deals with Renaat Braem's work in urbanism. In particular, it focuses on his regional and national planning visions. The linear city is the corner stone of Braem's thinking throughout his career that ran from the late 1920s to the 1980s. Braem's designs and proposals are compared to the international and national discourse on urbanism, and situated within the urbanization process of the post war era.
The development of Braem's hometown Antwerp, and his proposal for the Lillo satellite town in particular is used as a key project that illustrates the evolution in Braem's thinking. His 1937 graduation project for a linear city on the Albert Canal is a run-up to this project, while his later projects of the Bandstad (Strip City) and the project for Stad België (Belgium city) build upon it. The neighborhood models and housing projects designed for Lillo are at the core of the housing projects Braem built in the same period.
Safe for these housing projects, Braem's rather utopian visions for linear cities spanning the entire territory have at first sight had little impact on the urbanization of the country as a whole. However, when the underlying concepts are studied in greater detail and confronted with the development that took place on the ground, it becomes clear that his work continuously switches between utopia and reality. While his later versions of the Bandstad project take on the shape of Archigram-like megastructures and his writings echo the biological metaphors of the Metabolists, his projects are never placeless but adapted to the actual sites onto which they are projected.
Later planning documents, such as the Spatial Structure Plan of Flanders of 1997, in fact re-activate some of Braem's ideas, when they propose 'deconcentrated bundling' along infrastructure axes as a key development paradigm. The vision of Flanders as an integrated urban network, equally echoes Braem's precept to design the entire country as one city. The paper argues that, as utopian as Braem's urbanism work may seem, it displayed a constant concern to be as realistic as possible. This concern makes him a visionary: much of Braem's ideas remain valid to tackle present-day urbanization challenges.