Bruno Notteboom

KU Leuven | ku leuven · Faculty of Architecture

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...

The current state of our planet gives rise to a range of new perspectives in the environmental humanities that take « multispecies » viewpoints into account. These voices are often framed as « more-than-human » research, as they criticize the deeply anthropocentric worldviews that fuel environmental degradation and acknowledge the imbricated nature...

State of the art mass transit systems, such as bus rapid transit (BRT), have appeared to be an innovative solution to meet the mobility needs of many world cities. However, their ability to transform surrounding urban fabric remains less explored in the developing world. This paper examines the impacts of BRT Lahore on land development patterns, co...

The incompatibility between the microscale-built environment designs around mass transit stations and stakeholders' preferences causes dissatisfaction and inconvenience. The lack of a pedestrian-friendly environment, uncontrolled development patterns, traffic and parking issues make the street life vulnerable and unattractive for users, and affect...

Urban Resilience is seen by many as a tool to mitigate harm in times of extreme social, political, financial, and environmental stress. Despite its widespread usage, however, resilience is used in different ways by policy makers, activists, academics, and practitioners. Some see it as a key to unlocking a more stable and secure urban future in time...

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 Loui...

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 Loui...

This paper investigates the emergence of informal planning practices and their relationship with the new geometries of power and responsibility that characterise what is here defined and described as ‘fluid governance’; and that leads to co-creative forms of public space governance. In particular, the research explores the key role played by some p...

The societal and political support for reducing urban sprawl in the densely urbanized landscape of Flanders seems to be growing, albeit slow. In its white paper for a new strategic planning document, the Flemish government proposes an evolution towards a zero consumption of open space for urban development in 2040, compared to the 6 ha per day now....

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 bou...

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 bou...

This paper aims at providing a historical understanding of the role of gardens and green spaces in urbanization and urban planning, as well as in processes of social formation and social mobility that took place on the background of a changing spatial, socio-economical and political context in Belgium in the period 1889-1940. The research is based...

This article addresses a new mode of planning that involves a collaboration between State, private and community actors in the context of growing urban gardening movements. It questions the view of urban gardening as a manifestation of citizens’ dissensus towards administration’s institutional planning, and the expression of urban ‘counterplanning’...

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the photographic visualization of the Belgian city of Ghent is closely connected to its urban planning. On one hand, the city is transformed according to the logics of industrial modernization with its functional and spatial zoning. On the other hand, the city’s historical heritage is rediscovere...

Il numero 3/2015 della rivista «JoLA-Journal of Landscape Architecture» e un numero tematico intitolato "30 years back" ed e dedicato ad una discussione sull'evoluzione dell'architettura del paesaggio negli ultimi 30 anni. Gli editors della rivista sono: Bruno Notteboom, Jorg Rekittke (Articles section), Noel van Dooren (Under the Sky section), Kam...

In this article we discuss the recently published book Builders and planners. A history of land-use and infrastructure planning in the Netherlands, as a means to reflect on central themes in urban history: (1) technology, society and space; (2) city and countryside; and (3) environment and landscape. In doing so, the article shifts the perspective...

The 93th issue of OASE magazine examines the recent attention that has been paid to the relationship between landscape and urban planning. This issue explores historical and contemporary attempts at defining landscape as a public project, as well as the new constellations of government, designer, and citizen that go along with this process. OASE 93...

Le Nouveau Jardin Pittoresque (The New Picturesque Garden) association was founded in 1913 to ‘renew and popularize garden art’ in Belgium. Originally, the emancipation of the lower classes was put forward as an important task; the association acted as a platform for those who were interested in the ethical role of garden design. Taking its journal...

The paper investigates the shifting role of photography in the construction of collective cultural memory. It focuses on urban photography in Ghent, Belgium, at two particular periods of time. The paper is situated within the framework of the exhibition Edmond Sacré. Portrait of a City, curated by Ghent University in STAM (Ghent city museum), and a...

In their article "Narratives of Loss and Order and Imaging the Belgian Landscape 1900- 1945" Bruno Notteboom and David Peleman analyze a number of publications on landscape, focusing on narratives constructed by means of landscape images published in Belgium. With the work of Jean Massart and Emile Vanderwelde as a point of departure, Notteboom and...

This text takes the work of photographer Edmond Sacré (1851-1921) as a starting point to investigate the imagery of the Belgian city of Ghent. Around 1900, this city paralleled spatial order (by means of urban planning) and visual ordering (by means of all kinds of publications). This ordering of the image of the city and its inhabitants was closel...

Het werk van fotograaf Edmond Sacré (1851-1921) wordt in deze tekst als uitgangspunt genomen om de beeldvorming van de Belgische stad Gent te analyseren. Rond 1900 koppelde deze stad de ruimtelijke ordening, in de vorm van stedenbouwkundige ingrepen, aan een visuele ordening aan de hand van beelden in allerhande publicaties. Deze ordening van het b...

Recollecting Landscapes is a rephotographic survey project which documents a century of landscape transformation in Belgium. It is based on the successive photography of sixty sites at three moments in time between 1904 and 2004 [1, 2]. This paper takes the project as a starting point to investigate the subject of the image and its presentation. Th...

De aandacht voor landschap is vandaag afhankelijk van disparate en ontoereikende initiatieven. Vlaanderen heeft behoefte aan uitwisseling tussen onderzoek, ontwerp en beleid. Is de tijd rijp voor een landschapsintendant?

In archaeology, photography is mainly used as a technique for gathering data and evidence. Within the framework of the research project ‘(in)site, site-specific photography revised’ the relationship between photography and archaeology, or broader, history is explored. How do photographers visualize history? What is the importance of place, particul...

This contribution takes a critical look at the newly built extension of the arts centre deSingel built by the Belgian architecture office Stéphane Beel Architecten. Floré & Notteboom pay particular attention to the building's claim to materialize the concept of an 'arts city'. They also analyse the discourse developed by deSingel in the months and...

This article addresses the research question, structure, methods and research context of the PhD 'Landscape discourses and iconography in Belgium (1890-1940)'. I. RESEARCH QUESTION The aim of the PhD is to reveal the main discourses on landscape in Belgium between 1890 and 1940. It is the intention to outline a history of ideas, rather than to anal...

The paper examines how discourses on the monument, the city and the landscape were reflected in Belgian tourist publications, especially in the Bulletin du Touring Club de Belgique. In the early twentieth century, tourism increasingly tried to represent the city as a landscape that should be experienced through movement, rather than as a succession...