Journal articles by Koenraad Danneels
Landscape Research, 2025
In this contribution, I explore compensation landscapes as a concept through which we can questio... more In this contribution, I explore compensation landscapes as a concept through which we can question the nature of ecological urbanism today, as an alliance of environmental degradation, urban development and landscape design. In urbanism and landscape studies, there is currently almost no debate on the spatial dynamics created by the compensation of environmental harm. This is remarkable, as green urban landscapes are increasingly developed through biodiversity offsetting, i.e. the process where open space assets that have been destroyed through urban development are replaced elsewhere. While the literature on these topics is booming in critical geography and political ecology, I explore three scopes in which biodiversity offsetting can be studied as part of urbanism and landscape studies. Through the spatialization of compensation, the linking of offsetting to planning research, and by giving attention to landscape design, this paper frames compensation as a socio-spatial urbanisation project.
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2024
This article contributes to the genealogy of green infrastructure design by shifting the focus fr... more This article contributes to the genealogy of green infrastructure design by shifting the focus from science and technology to include broader societal, political and aesthetic issues, using a critical historical analysis of landscape design. We examine post-war Belgian green infrastructure projects by landscape architect René Pechère (1908–2002) to uncover the complex negotiations between politics, aesthetics and technology. The focus of this article is Pechère's conception of the ‘Green Plan’, which merged the motorway and the garden to create the Belgian landscape as a ‘garden territory’. We argue that this landscape policy was not merely a ‘green’ compensation for a ‘grey’ infrastructure project, but a strategy to create a modern infrastructural landscape for Belgium. Pechère's plans served as instruments for modernisation within the post-war welfare state in combination with aesthetic principles rooted in fascist Germany. His objectives were to mitigate urbanisation processes, create an aestheticised landscape representation of the nation, and redistribute green spaces across the territory. This article aims to foster a critical re-engagement with contemporary infrastructure design discussions by developing a nuanced understanding of green infrastructure as a sociopolitical tool for territorial organisation.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2023
Today, design disciplines such as ecological urbanism aim at fusing natural and social sciences t... more Today, design disciplines such as ecological urbanism aim at fusing natural and social sciences to restore the equilibrium between social and natural systems, and in extenso the urban and natural environment. But recent literature in urban political ecology and urban history has shown how this socioecological approach is generally stripped down to a merely ecological perspective, ignoring the sociopolitical side of the urban ecological project. I therefore argue that there is a need for a research programme that interrogates the history of the interaction between ecology, planning and politics. In this article I respond by developing a historical perspective on the rise of the ecosystemic approach towards the city, delving into the agency and political nature of ecological science itself. Through an in-depth historical analysis of the Brussels school of urban ecology and urban ecologist Paul Duvigneaud, I highlight how urban ecology influenced politics through its association with the regional government and vice versa to argue that ecological knowledge was used to overcome political opposition, incorporate a specific regionalist agenda and build an ecological zoning practice in urban planning policies.
Oase: journal of architecture, 2020
ENG/ In this article, a landscape drawing of Brussels by René Pechère (1965) is read as a strateg... more ENG/ In this article, a landscape drawing of Brussels by René Pechère (1965) is read as a strategic exercise to rethink the Brussels region. It discusses the capacity of such a drawing to speculate on the existence of a valley landscape, and how that landscape can be the basis for an urban project.
NL/ In dit artikel wordt een landschapstekening van Brussel door René Pechère (1965) gelezen als een strategische oefening om de Brusselse regio te overdenken. Het stuk bespreekt het vermogen van een dergelijke tekening om te speculeren op het bestaan van een valleilandschap, en hoe dat landschap de basis kan zijn voor een stedenbouwkundig project.
AGORA, 2018
'Stedelijk metabolisme' wordt vaak bekritiseerd omdat het een theoretisch concept zou zijn dat ge... more 'Stedelijk metabolisme' wordt vaak bekritiseerd omdat het een theoretisch concept zou zijn dat geen rekening houdt met de inbedding van stromen en infrastructuur in een concrete ruimte. Toch toont het werk van Brussels ecoloog Paul Duvigneaud dat de totstandkoming ervan in de stadsecologie veel complexer is: zowel via het inbrengen van abstract cijfermateriaal, als lokale ecologische kennis, werd in de jaren '70 een specifiek, 'Brussels' metabolismemodel gecreëerd.
Journal of Landscape Architecture, 2019
During and after the First World War, Belgian landscape architect and planner Louis Van der Swael... more During and after the First World War, Belgian landscape architect and planner Louis Van der Swaelmen attempted to develop a ‘sociobiological’ theory and practice of landscape architecture, urbanism and urbanization. Both in his writings and designs he combined biological approaches with sociopolitical concerns. In this article, I will focus on the ambitions and ambiguities of this approach. First, a history of ideas will show how the sociobiological theory of Van der Swaelmen was the outcome of an intermingling of the science of ethology and landscape theory. This trajectory culminated in the book Préliminaires d’art civique, in which he created a theory of urbanism based on the idea of urbanization as a process following biological laws, and an urban design approach based on geographical and geobotanical knowledge. The second part of the article will trace the translation of these ideas into the design (process) of the garden suburbs Le Logis and Floréal and will further question the use of a biological approach in urbanism, offering a critical reflection on today’s (lack of) sociopolitical questions in ecological urbanism.
OASE. Journal of Architecture., 2019
EN/ In this article, the case of the Ghent Slaughterhouse (1857) is mobilised to show how changin... more EN/ In this article, the case of the Ghent Slaughterhouse (1857) is mobilised to show how changing ideas on 'good' and 'bad' nature restructured the food supply of the city. It retraces the economic, political and societal reasoning behind the decision to rethink the urban metabolism through the introduction of new legislation and the construction of buildings and urban areas, staging the meat supply as a distinctively urban question.
NL/ In dit artikel wordt de casus van het Gentse Slachthuis (1857) gemobiliseerd om te laten zien hoe veranderende ideeën over 'goede' en 'slechte' natuur de voedselvoorziening van de stad weten te herstructureren. Het artikel traceert de economische, politieke en maatschappelijke redenering achter de beslissing om de stedelijke stofwisseling the heroverwegen. Dit vond plaats door de invoering van nieuwe wetgeving, de aanleg van gebouwen en de ontwikkeling van stedelijke gebieden. De vleesvoorziening wordt daarbij als een uitgesproken stedelijke kwestie geënsceneerd.
AGORA, 2018
Zie: http://www.agora-magazine.nl/uncategorized/metabolisme/.
Stedelijk metabolisme vindt als ... more Zie: http://www.agora-magazine.nl/uncategorized/metabolisme/.
Stedelijk metabolisme vindt als concept steeds meer zijn weg naar de stedenbouwkundige praktijk in België en Nederland. Hoewel dit begrip zelf ongedefinieerd lijkt te zijn in de praktijk en geproblematiseerd wordt in de academische wereld, blijft de vraag hoe het concept nieuwe toepassingen en perspectieven creëert. In dit themanummer gaan we op zoek naar de tastbare praktijken die het stedelijk metabolisme vormgeven en de definitie ervan beïnvloeden.
Stadsgeschiedenis, 2017
After the Second World War, the construction of large scale road infrastructure in Belgium became... more 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.
SPOOL: Criticising Practice – Practicing criticism, 2018
On January 2016, a joint consortium of the Flemish and Brussels Chief Architects published Metrop... more On January 2016, a joint consortium of the Flemish and Brussels Chief Architects published Metropolitan Landscapes. Espaces ouvert, base de développement urbain/Open ruimte als basis voor stedelijke ontwikkeling. Based on the assumption that open spaces have the potential to spur and structure future urban development and surpass administrative boundaries, Metropolitan Landscapes presents research by design, authored by four prominent design firms with the intention of jumpstarting conversations about a shared spatial vision for the fragmented territory of Brussels and its periphery. In this article, we examine the methodology and definitions put forth by Bureau Bas Smets & List, explore the historical context that has rendered the landscape approach so promising in Brussels, and perform a thematic and critical reading of the four projects and their underlying rationale. These projects demonstrate the potential of landscape to engender novel territorial solutions. However, by choosing to ignore competing spatial claims and tending towards a techno-managerial rationale based on infrastructural and ecological systems, these designs raise questions as to the capacity of the landscape approach to deal with ever-present socio-political concerns in Brussels.
Book Chapters by Koenraad Danneels
A Research Agenda for Landscape Studies of Planning, 2025
Today, urbanism and planning are engaged in a productive alliance with the natural sciences, whic... more Today, urbanism and planning are engaged in a productive alliance with the natural sciences, which has led to the global rise of ecological forms of urbanism. Landscape readings of the territory are being used to rethink large-scale planning policies in urban regions worldwide, but are ignoring the historical and political dynamics that underscore urbanisation processes. Through an analysis of contemporary and historical design proposals to rethink the urban landscape of Brussels, this chapter explores the role of history in critically assessing contemporary landscape design proposals. It proposes a research agenda in landscape planning that explicitly mobilises a ‘history of the present’ to analyse ecological urbanism as a socio-political project.
Forest Urbanisms: New Non-Human and Human Ecologies for the 21st Century, 2024
Urban Resilience in a Global Context. Actors, Narratives, and Temporalities, 2020
This chapter, co-written by Koenraad Danneels, Greet De Block, and Bruno Notteboom, examines the ... more This chapter, co-written by Koenraad Danneels, Greet De Block, and Bruno Notteboom, examines the influence of Belgian natural scientists and urban designers in creating a socio-environmental perspective on urban resilience. The first part of the chapter looks at the idea of the ‘sociobiological city,’ which was developed by landscape architect Louis Van der Swaelmen as a response to the destructions of the First World War. The second part of the essay explores the concept of the city as an ecosystem, which ecologist Paul Duvigneaud developed in response to
the environmental crisis of the 1970s. This historical analysis draws attention to the use of crisis, the idea of equilibrium and the (contested) sociopolitical motives and forces in resilient urbanism as it developed in 20th-century Belgium. These two scientific approaches also offer critical insights into the new concept of resilience, highlighting ways that power and inequality are embedded in socio-biological metaphors, and asking how these metaphors continue to be used in current debates about resilience.
Conference proceedings by Koenraad Danneels
Landscapes of Conflict. ECLAS Conference 2018, Ghent, Belgium. Conference Proceedings, 2018
During the immediate aftermath of the German invasion in Belgium in 1914, Belgian architectural a... more During the immediate aftermath of the German invasion in Belgium in 1914, Belgian architectural and landscape professionals organized themselves in unoccupied countries to structure a common agenda to rebuild Belgium. During this exile period, Louis van der Swaelmen, a landscape architect and self-proclaimed urban planner, wrote a book on the reconstruction of his home country, linking the rebirth of Belgium to the development of a so-called sociobiolo- gical urbanization theory. In this book, van der Swaelmen proposed to develop a practice of urban planning based both on an objective and scientific survey method, and on a harmonious integration of the natural and man-made environment. By designing some garden cities around Brussels in the 1920s, he tested his theoretical framework, interlinking its spatial layout with the existing topography. today, in the wake of an environmental crisis where landscape architects again envision a central role for themselves, these disciplinary questions resurface on the research agenda. this article therefore digs deeper into the issue of adopting biological methods and metaphors in landscape architecture by analyzing how this sociobiolo- gical theory was developed. By retracing the influences of biological work onto his design practice, it defines what it means to work with a biologically-based urbanism, and reframes some key question in ecology, urbanism and landscape architecture today.
On Reproduction. Re-imagining the political ecology of urbanism. Urbanism & Urbanization Conference Proceedings., 2018
Today, design proposals like ‘Metropolitan Landscapes’ and ‘Metabolism of the Brussels Region’ ai... more Today, design proposals like ‘Metropolitan Landscapes’ and ‘Metabolism of the Brussels Region’ aim at fusing natural and social sciences to restore the equilibrium between social and natural systems, and in extenso the urban and natural environment. However, this socio-ecological approach, typical of ecological urbanism, is often stripped down to a biological perspective. Metabolic schemes of city systems
demonstrate the current course taken by the design field, by stressing that the city is a natural organism, constructed through biological
flows rather than existing spaces and people. In this paper, I will invoke a historical reading of a biological approach towards the city by
retracing the linkages between ecologists and planners in Brussels. Using the case of Paul Duvigneaud and the Brussels Agglomeration
(1970-1980), I claim that ecology is used to both overcome political opposition and incorporate a specific (political) agenda. By performing a close reading of archival material, this historical analysis raises attention for (contested) socio-political motives and forces, thus leading to a reconsideration of the way in which ecology and design is related to political and social contexts.
Creation/Reaction: ECLAS conference 2017., 2017
Beyond Ism: the Landscape of Landscape Urbanism, conference, Alnarp, Sweden, proceedings, 2016.
Isms' as Landscape Urbanism and Ecological Urbanism claim the notion of landscape as a way of int... more Isms' as Landscape Urbanism and Ecological Urbanism claim the notion of landscape as a way of integrating different disciplines into their practices, thus introducing new methods and concepts that are stemming from disciplines other than urbanism, namely sociology, biology, ecology and engineering. This 'disciplinary promiscuity' -as Charles Waldheim describes it -remains a source of confusion within the disciplines of landscape architecture and urbanism. 1 In this paper we attempt to question this disciplinary interaction, and define the (productive) openings and frictions it entails. Concepts from other disciplines are used to insert new methods and metaphors into the field of design, which is both epistemologically and methodologically not unproblematic. Also, the current disciplinary alliances are often approached from an outspoken, 'problem solving' approach, but the question remains -which socio-political agenda and ideological choices underpin the concepts developed in these disciplines? 2 To investigate these questions more closely, we focus on biology, planning and landscape theory and practices in Belgium at the turn of the 20th century, along with the emerging concept of socio-biology within these fields. The concept was first introduced in Belgian urban planning theory by landscape architect/urban planner Louis Van der Swaelmen (1883 around the First World War. 3 However, biologist Jean Massart (1865-1925) and sociologist/politician Emile Vandervelde (1866-1938) had introduced a sociobiological theory in the Belgian scientific and socio-political context almost two decades before. In the paper we will unravel the percolation of methods and metaphors that are derived from biological sciences into socio-political discourses and the fields of urbanism and landscape design. As we shall see, social sciences, but also theory of urbanism has turned to biology to render their study more 'scientific', and thus more credible. Studying how certain terms 'migrate' between disciplines can teach us more about the political and epistemological agendas behind actors and disciplines.
Books by Koenraad Danneels
From Sociobiology to Urban Metabolism: the Interaction of Urbanism, Science and Politics in Brussels, (1900-1978)
Today, urbanism and urban design are engaging in a productive alliance with the natural sciences,... more Today, urbanism and urban design are engaging in a productive alliance with the natural sciences, leading to the international rise of ecological forms of urbanism. In the Brussels region, socio-ecological approaches are rethinking the urban landscape, and the turn towards landscape design as well as metabolic schemes and circular economy goals show that the region has become a telling manifestation of these evolutions. Still, the implications of these interactions remain unclear, and this dissertation therefore provides the necessary historical background to understand and critically assess today's alliance of ecology and urbanism. Indeed, while this use of ecology in urbanism, planning and design seems new and innovative, the history of Brussels - a crossroads of ideas and practices in urbanism - is littered with examples in which disciplinary constellations of urbanists, landscape designers, scientists and politicians created 'ecological' or 'environmental' forms of urbanism theory and practice. After the First World War, urbanists and landscape architects started to design garden cities fusing urban housing and rural landscapes in the vicinity of Brussels, based on sociobiological urban theories. In the post-Second World War period highway construction centred around Brussels created possibilities for landscape designers to rethink and redesign the green structure of the city. In the 1970s, the advent of urban ecology in Brussels as a new scientific field went hand in hand with new zoning plans, rethinking the city-nature dichotomy through new regional planning policies. All these episodes of environmental forms of urbanism were created by specific historical constellations of actors working on urban questions in Brussels. This dissertation delves into these particular episodes of Brussels' urban history and zooms in on the work and network of three experts - urbanist Louis Van der Swaelmen, landscape architect René Pechère, and urban ecologist Paul Duvigneaud - who serve as entry points to map the alliances of disciplines that created different hybrid urbanism theories. It tracks down the different uses of ecological discourses in urbanism and unearths the political aspects of ecological urban design. This research therefore builds a critical historical reflection on ecological urbanism theory and gives insight into the ways in which socio-ecological ideas and concepts find traction and are reshaped by urban design and the urban reality.
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Journal articles by Koenraad Danneels
NL/ In dit artikel wordt een landschapstekening van Brussel door René Pechère (1965) gelezen als een strategische oefening om de Brusselse regio te overdenken. Het stuk bespreekt het vermogen van een dergelijke tekening om te speculeren op het bestaan van een valleilandschap, en hoe dat landschap de basis kan zijn voor een stedenbouwkundig project.
NL/ In dit artikel wordt de casus van het Gentse Slachthuis (1857) gemobiliseerd om te laten zien hoe veranderende ideeën over 'goede' en 'slechte' natuur de voedselvoorziening van de stad weten te herstructureren. Het artikel traceert de economische, politieke en maatschappelijke redenering achter de beslissing om de stedelijke stofwisseling the heroverwegen. Dit vond plaats door de invoering van nieuwe wetgeving, de aanleg van gebouwen en de ontwikkeling van stedelijke gebieden. De vleesvoorziening wordt daarbij als een uitgesproken stedelijke kwestie geënsceneerd.
Stedelijk metabolisme vindt als concept steeds meer zijn weg naar de stedenbouwkundige praktijk in België en Nederland. Hoewel dit begrip zelf ongedefinieerd lijkt te zijn in de praktijk en geproblematiseerd wordt in de academische wereld, blijft de vraag hoe het concept nieuwe toepassingen en perspectieven creëert. In dit themanummer gaan we op zoek naar de tastbare praktijken die het stedelijk metabolisme vormgeven en de definitie ervan beïnvloeden.
Book Chapters by Koenraad Danneels
the environmental crisis of the 1970s. This historical analysis draws attention to the use of crisis, the idea of equilibrium and the (contested) sociopolitical motives and forces in resilient urbanism as it developed in 20th-century Belgium. These two scientific approaches also offer critical insights into the new concept of resilience, highlighting ways that power and inequality are embedded in socio-biological metaphors, and asking how these metaphors continue to be used in current debates about resilience.
Conference proceedings by Koenraad Danneels
demonstrate the current course taken by the design field, by stressing that the city is a natural organism, constructed through biological
flows rather than existing spaces and people. In this paper, I will invoke a historical reading of a biological approach towards the city by
retracing the linkages between ecologists and planners in Brussels. Using the case of Paul Duvigneaud and the Brussels Agglomeration
(1970-1980), I claim that ecology is used to both overcome political opposition and incorporate a specific (political) agenda. By performing a close reading of archival material, this historical analysis raises attention for (contested) socio-political motives and forces, thus leading to a reconsideration of the way in which ecology and design is related to political and social contexts.
Books by Koenraad Danneels