Antwerp’s call to activism
Chris Bailey responds to Mikael Colville-Andersen’s The Life-Sized City visit to Antwerp (close, but no tattoo).
Customarily, Michael Colville-Andersen gets a tattoo in the city he’s just visited. He didn’t in Antwerp, maybe because he ran out of skin in the last series, or because he was unsure of Antwerp’s current identity and future. I think the latter is more likely, though the episode as usual is full of insight and inspiration.
He asks his first interviewee, sociologist and author of a book on The Rise of the Common City, ‘what is Antwerp?’, as if its contemporary function is unclear. And his last conversation is with an activist who is optimistic about a developer’s city park scheme putting the sprawling urban motorway network underground. Again he is ambivalent in his response, ‘let’s wait and see’.
The life-sized city is always about how neighbourhood activism can offer models of a better definition of growth than the standard liberal model, circular rather than extractive, focused on wellbeing rather than profit, etc. In Antwerp we see lots of admirable examples of determined and creative activism in many neighbourhoods, but there is a massive pachyderm in the room, in the form of the colossal Port of Antwerp-Bruges.
The rich heritage of Antwerp that attracts the tourists is owed to its position on the River Scheldt. Trading around the globe brought wealth into the city, including the diamonds obtained in Africa during Belgium’s exploitation of the Congo. Antwerp is still a trading hub for diamonds, but the vast flow of trade is not on the Scheldt, but on the motorways heading straight to the second largest port in Europe. Sandwiched between river and road, the old city is now huddled on the central reservation, separated from the growing municipality over on the hard shoulder by streams of lorries carrying shipping containers.
Port of Antwerp-Bruges - or “Flatscape with Containers” as Banham called it
Containerisation, where goods are packed and unpacked only once, into steel boxes that are a standard size designed for ‘multi-modal transport’, struck port cities almost overnight. Stacks of containers at Felixstowe were an alien spectacle to critic Reyner Banham writing in New Society in 1967, though we now think nothing of meeting for a snack or drink at SPARK. Vessels to move these units have grown in size until the only limit is the width of the Suez Canal. The largest container ship in the world carries over 24,000 TEUs (20-foot containers), and calls at Antwerp. The port deals with 13.4 million TEUs every year. Europe imports over $470bn of goods every year and exports over $270bn, much of it through Antwerp. Thanks to containerisation, and the logistics of global trade, wealth now literally bypasses the city.
Containers are shifted singly onto trucks, which requires a radically different road system, thus changing the geography of maritime ports like Antwerp, just as it did in Liverpool, Hull, and perhaps most disastrously, Dover. Also removed at a stroke were the dock and harbour jobs that depended on unloading and loading, breaking down and packing the bulk cargoes of the past, and the local economy that went with them.
In another 50 years will it seem like the best solution is to bury Antwerp’s tangle of motorways underground? Today’s anti-motorway campaigners might look foolish if autonomous EV road trains replace polluting, noisy diesel trucks, or if Trumpian tariff wars stem the torrent of Chinese goods ordered online by European citizens. Perhaps most likely is that China, by investing in the development of other port cities in Greece and Italy, will no longer need its ships to sail as far as less conveniently located Antwerp. In York’s history there are sympathetic echoes of its pre-railway decline in manufacturing pre-eminence, firstly to Leeds and then in shipping, to Hull.
To Michael Colville-Andersen’s ambivalence about the parkland scheme his interviewee’s answer was, we are working with the project, not against it, to ensure social outcomes are achieved, not just during the project’s construction, but throughout its life. This redefines the standard idea of activism, in which opponents object to a scheme, which is modified (or not) and goes ahead. Instead of defining success as forcing changes made during project design, permanent activism in the ‘common city’ aims to deal with the larger context, the life of the city in the past and future, and the economic and social forces bearing on it. Activists and politicians need one another, working together to create and to re-tell the narrative of the city.
Once the idea of activism is redefined like this, it becomes obvious that we ought to want every citizen (and every child, come to that) to be an activist. This changes our expectation of democracy. The system in which we vote every four years to see a manifesto enacted (or not) should evolve into a participative democracy, including and engaging all citizens in the future of their city.