• 1 A long version of this article will be published soon (2008) under the title: “Expo ’58 and daily m (...)

1The gates of Expo ’58 closed on 19 October 1958. However, the world fair’s impact on Brussels did not end there. This article strives to show first of all the most pronounced decisive and lasting influence that Expo ’58 had on the city, that is, its role in catalysing a development in which the “car was king”. It then goes on to wonder about the future of the major urban thoroughfares and motorways that were created from the 1950s on at a time when another model of the city, one that is less dependent on the car, is spreading internationally and the development of sustainable mobility is becoming a priority.

• 2 The rise in the number of cars in the country continued to be extremely high over the next decade ( (...)
• 3 The first Volkswagen Beetle was created in 1938, the Renault 4 Chevaux (4 horsepower) in 1946, and (...)

2The 1950s were a turning point in Belgium when it came to family ownership of cars after the trough of World War II. These years were considered those of the “take off” [Scholliers, 1992], with the highest rates of increase in car ownership ever posted (+175.3%2). The annual rate of increase in the number of vehicles, which was 10% on average for the entire country, was noticeably higher in Brussels and its environs [Ministère des travaux publics et de la reconstruction, 1956]. With 1 vehicle per 16 inhabitants in 1956, Belgium was, along with England and France, at the head of the European pack, although it remained far behind the United States, which already had 1 vehicle for 3 inhabitants, given that it had begun mass production earlier (with the Ford Model T in particular) and suffered less from the war. Whereas previously the car was reserved for an elite that used it first as a new sign of social prestige, in Europe’s most industrialised countries the immediate post-war period and 1950s in particular were marked by the automobile’s entering the era of mass consumption (which it was considered to spearhead) and the advent of the “automotive society” [Yonnet, 1984]3 However, not until the period between 1965 and 1980 were the social gaps in car ownership rates fully bridged.

• 4 Actually, the “Junction Saga” lasted much longer: Talk about the junction began in 1837, the Town H (...)
• 5 All in all, 128 kilometres of carriageway was either built or modernised, 119 crossroads laid out, (...)
• 6 During this period only Madou Tunnel, the building of which had been postponed after a compromise w (...)
• 7 The Royal Decree of 14 January 1969 “concerning productivity bonuses for the civil engineers of the (...)

5For Hondermarcq, “…this network naturally was not based on the exhibition’s special needs. It met constant needs, and what was important was to do some of the work within a brief deadline to be able to meet the unusual traffic needs that would be felt during the run of the Exhibition” [Hondermarcq, no date, quoted by Demey, 1992: 20]. However, the officials in charge nevertheless recognised that “without being the sole justification for the work done in the Brussels area, the Exhibition helped to make this work more urgent and, consequently, to set a particularly strict timetable for its completion” [Ministère des travaux publics et de la reconstruction, 1957: 77]. With hindsight, we can go even further and write that Expo ’58 was a decisive catalyst of the “car as king” policy that was waged in Brussels. Indeed, it first stimulated the design of an overall plan and rapid achievement of a consensus on this plan despite a variety of opposing positions. Next, it made it possible to set up in record time some vital milestones of this plan and in so doing to go beyond the point of no return, thereby requiring the subsequent continuation of the works and even their extension. So, whilst it took more than forty years of shilly-shallying to build the North-South train junction4, a scant three years was necessary to metamorphose the boulevards of the inner beltway (several tunnels were built and the surface carriageways were redone), build or redo a part of the outer boulevards, build the first part of the ring road (between the Oostend and Antwerp motorways), redo the profiles of many radial arteries (starting with Leopold II Boulevard and its viaduct), and build access roads to the Expo site5. After Expo ’58, the pace of work moreover slowed down: After a pause that lasted until 19626, the investments resumed with the complete overhaul of Avenue Louise/Louisalaan along the lines of what was done to the inner beltway. Next, the Roadways Administration’s plan of 1964, which followed the “spoke-and-wheel model”, bolstered that of Hondermarcq and foresaw the building of the ring road and new entering motorways and express lanes that the B1 Intermunicipal Company created in 1971 was to carry out (and did so incompletely, following growing opposition from residents and the region’s municipalities)7. The 2 534 m long Leopold II Tunnel, which was put into service on 31 August 1986 to replace the viaduct of the same name, wrapped up three decades of major road works (designed primarily with the car in mind) in Brussels.

• 8 Brussels effectively got the headquarters “provisionally” in 1959.

And that was indeed the clincher: making Brussels the capital of tomorrow’s Europe. In the middle of the European motorway network, “our Capital, the crossroads of the West’s major traditional routes, will be able, with total legitimacy, to claim a choice place in the United Europe of tomorrow”, Omer Vanaudenhove wrote in the conclusions of the Ministry of Public Works and Reconstruction’s publication Bruxelles, Carrefour de l’Occident [1956: 95] (Brussels, Crossroads of the West). Vanaudenhove, who was known as the “road angel”, alluded once more to this destiny during the inauguration of part of the new boulevards of the inner beltway, on 28 September 1957, just shortly after Belgium submitted its official candidacy to house the seat of the European Commission and Council of Ministers8.

• 9 Hondermarcq’s visionary role must nevertheless be recognised, for he had already proposed in 1951 c (...)
• 10 A problematisation approach is a way for the parties concerned to define and treat a matter that is (...)
• 11 By “natural state” Lannoy [1999: 38] means “the character of the phenomenon that is inherent in its (...)
• 12 This history of transport can, moreover, be read as a history of speed [Studeny, 2005].
• 13 “Traffic has become a technique and techniques are matters for technicians,” is how he put it [quot (...)
• 14 To cope with what M. Halsey [1941, quoted by Lannoy, 1999] called intersection friction (between pe (...)
• 15 Or “internal friction” (between vehicles travelling in the same direction). Besides intersection fr (...)
• 16 Between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., in both directions. Source: SPF Mobilité et transports, Recensement gén (...)

8It is interesting to dwell a second upon the vision of road traffic that underlies the remarks and actions of Henri Hondermarcq9 and his successors quasi paradigmatically. It is effectively typical of the problematisation approach10 that Pierre Lannoy [1999] terms “nomological”. In such an approach, the natural state11 of the road order is clearly described as one of conflict: conflicts between the various occupants of the street, between the various traffic flows, even between different social classes. The road must thus be “pacified…by organising speed”12 through traffic regulations and road engineering aimed primarily at separating the traffic flows (car traffic is effectively hobbled most by all of the obstacles that reduce speed, i.e., pedestrians, cyclists, mass transport, parked cars, and so on). So it is that a new “science”, that of “traffic engineering”, was born in the United States, a science that Hondermarcq espoused. Indeed, he wanted to be one of its spearheads in Europe to reduce the lag in traffic regulation that had built up in the Old World13. Thanks to this science, writes the Public Works and Reconstruction Ministry, “…it is now possible to determine with certainty the moment at which work on different levels absolutely must be foreseen. Such studies, very advanced ones, are what enabled our country’s technicians to designate accurately which of the intersections with the inner beltway had to be changed so as to allow traffic to flow on various levels”14 [Ministère des travaux publics et de la reconstruction, 1956: 64]. Another type of friction that our engineers studied closely is the operation that “in ‘traffic engineering’ [in English in the text] terms is called weaving”15, that is to say, the moment when tunnel traffic wants to leave this main channel and vice versa. “Road engineering provides the solution to this problem in that it lets you determine the minimum weaving distances that are necessary” [Ministère des travaux publics et de la reconstruction, 1956: 66]. So it is that “in the case of the boulevards of the inner beltway, no single weaving section between the successive future crossroads will be less than 100 m”, which will allow the weaving of 1 200 vehicles per hour under good conditions. At the time, the expected rush hour traffic was not supposed to exceed 700 vehicles per hour. Today, some 60 000 vehicles use the inner beltway each day16.

• 17 The introduction of a new problematisation approach does not for all that mean the previous approac (...)

10This is because another vision of urban traffic developed, another problematisation approach17 that Lannoy [1999] terms “ethological”, has developed since the inception of traffic engineering. Several scientists thus showed that “extending roads does not make traffic more fluid, but on the contrary increases the number of vehicles on the road, which results in maintaining, even increasing, the congestion rate” [Lannoy, 1999: 44] and, consequently, the pressure that is exerted by cars, just like the risk of accidents, is inherent in the traffic phenomenon. “Neither one nor the other can be eliminated, but they can both be reduced” inside what would henceforward be considered a system. In this system, all parties (from the motorist to the other users, with the decision-makers on the various levels of power, transport companies, and so on in between) have a role to play, unlike the “nomological” approach in which responsibility is in the hands of the community’s representatives (elected officials, institutions, and government administrations) alone. Seen from this angle, it is rather significant to underline the fact that after the country’s “public works” and “transport & highways” powers were largely regionalised, they are now reunited under officials, be they ministers or deputy mayors, in charge of the more comprehensive matter of “mobility” [Misonne and Hubert, 2003].

• 18 That of the German landscape architectural firm Latz & Partner in partnership with the Brussels fir (...)
• 19 The project that was selected, also through an international competition (2006), is that of the Bru (...)
• 20 The winner of this competition (2006) was the town planner and architect Benoît Moritz (MSA).

12Whereas these discussions are far from over today, at a time when dispelling the “trouble spots” in the city’s surface mass transport network calls for changes that would clearly be unfavourable for the passenger car [Courtois and Dobruszkes, 2008], another way of conceiving of sharing public space came to light recently with the revamping of place Flagey/Flageyplein in Ixelles/Elsene. After many twists and turns, the project that was finally chosen18 through an international competition (2006) opted for a “single area” approach giving “soft” transport modes the lion’s share of the square but without marking the physical boundaries between users too clearly. The planned overhauls of Place Rogier/Rogierpleinr19 and Place de la Monnaie/Muntplein20 share the same philosophy. Will these examples create a new school of thought and will they confirm the ascendancy that architects, town planners, and landscape architects appear to be taking over engineers?

• 21 Work of the town planner and architect Benoît Moritz (MSA), in partnership with the French architec (...)

14In the same vein, the “Botanique” master plan21 that the Brussels Government adopted in 2006 provides for putting the existing transit lanes of Victoria Regina Avenue, along the former Botanical Gardens, in a tunnel so as to make the boulevard named after the gardens more user-friendly and reconnect it to the gardens. However, this project is no closer to having a budget and timetable than the previous one.

• 22 The public poll about Rogier Square’s revamping that was conducted in June‑July 2007 showed clearly (...)
• 23 Putting Victoria Regina Avenue and the open Toison d’or Tunnel underground would not rule out impro (...)

15Many of today’s public works projects in Brussels are trying, not without difficulty22, to re-establish user-friendly areas where the will in prior decades had been to “adapt the existing urban network, which was necessarily based on the data of the past, [to modernity” [Ministère des travaux publics et de la reconstruction, 1956: 10]. This undertaking commits without necessarily challenging the existing infrastructure’s capacity (in the above-mentioned examples, talk has been about putting existing thoroughfares underground, not eliminating them or reducing their size), but even considers, depending on the case, improving their performance levels23.

• 24 Number of vehicles x mean distance travelled.
• 25 Road traffic tripled between 1970 and 2003 to reach the index value of 317 (1970 baseline = 100) [D (...)
• 26 We must also touch upon the rise in air travel. In 2005, the total number of plane passengers in th (...)
• 27 The 30 km zones, the number of which has been rising in Brussels [Région de Bruxelles-Capitale, 200 (...)

16This merely seems to be a paradox, to the extent that this type of revamping, which gives soft transport modes the lion’s share, must accommodate a more mobile population. Indeed, people have never moved around as much as they do today. Just as an example, the number of vehicle-kilometres24, which is a good indicator of the volume of automobile traffic, is continuing to rise in Belgium, even though the trend is continuing at a slower pace25; the number of trips made by STIB/MIVB’s riders, for its part, rose 60% between 2000 and 2006. Far from being static, our society has become hypermobile, in any event when it comes to some of its components. People thus want to be able to continue moving around faster and faster and farther and farther26 whilst continuing to enjoy areas for rest and relaxation or “slower” strolling27 when they stop or slow down.

• 28 Article 36 of the 207‑2011 management contract between the Brussels-Capital Region and STIB/MIVB pr (...)

21Seen from this angle, Brussels once again seems to be badly off. First, effective information management requires giving priority to having a seamless functional network rather than a seamless administrative territory. Now, we all know the institutional situation of the Brussels-Capital Region, which is unable to conclude cooperation agreements with the neighbouring Walloon and Flemish regions to manage an “urban transport community” such as exists in many countries. Second, STIB/ MIVB has not yet managed – for reasons that have to do with its own policy at some times and to Brussels’s institutional complexity at other times – to impose an effective information system for its vehicles (remote controlled traffic lights at crossroads are far from the rule, for example28) and for its passengers, who are rarely informed “in real time” of what is going on (the waiting time panels at stops are either missing or damaged; phone or text message information is exorbitantly expensive if it even exists; Mobile Internet is still not an option for most public transport passengers; and so on). Now, we are aware of how important it is for users – potential as well as current ones – to have access to a service that makes their lives easier rather than more complicated [Montulet et al., 2007]. Meanwhile, GPS devices are phenomenally popular with motorists and they are given real-time assistance (radio traffic bulletins and navigational advice, cell-phone traffic updates, and so on) to make their journeys smoother!

• 29 The same holds true if we compare Brussels to towns of similar size.

23Expo ’58 a thus gave a decisive and lasting boost to a policy in which everything kowtowed to the car in Brussels at a key moment, that of the car’s “take-off”. In creating a deadline, the crucial opening of Expo ’58 set the tempo and contributed greatly to making Brussels, with fewer than two inhabitants per vehicle, one of the capital cities with the highest car ownership ratio in Europe29.

• 30 Or 135 municipalities with a total population of close to 3 million that includes the Brussels-Capi (...)

24The forecast scenario for 2015 [Région de Bruxelles-Capitale, 2006], based on the current trend, is that of the crushing dominance of the car over the entire territory concerned by the extension of the future Regional Express Network30 (REN ‑ or RER in French). A true ring of congestion will surround the Brussels-Capital Region, which will itself be clogged with cars. According to this scenario, traffic will be so bad that the differences in travel times by car and public transport will be nil.

• 31 Various measures can be envisioned, such as a mileage tax or an urban toll in one part of the Regio (...)

25This crisis situation, which is already largely perceptible today, may be an opportunity to seize in order to turn the trend around. As we round a new technological bend, only a massive investment plan in Brussels’s urban mass transport and the latter’s inclusion in a management and information system embracing the appropriate functional scale (the REN zone) will be able counterbalance the road network expansion plans that marked the last three decades starting with Expo ’58. Such a policy cannot be waged without thinking about road traffic and parking conditions, especially when it comes to the “supporting measures” to set up with the REN, as well as the external costs of travelling by car and the latter’s contribution to financing public transport31. Nor will it be possible without setting up civic participation schemes based on successful experiences that lead to a better environment and quality of life and grounding the redoing of urban areas that have been degraded by the great road infrastructure projects of the past in town-planning and architectural considerations.