The notion of the node: disentangling and conceptualizing infrastructure nodes in the Eurometropolis Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai

ABSTRACT

The Eurometropolis Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai is a dispersed territory increasingly confronted with challenges related to its indispensable infrastructure networks. This article establishes a theoretical-conceptual base for the notion of the infrastructure node and states its strategic importance to reimagine dispersed territories. Literature and case study research resulted in four types of nodes: crossings, generators, nexuses, and cluster. This article concludes that there is a distinct difference between nodes in dispersed territories and compact cities and that therefore a shift is needed from form to process design, dealing with complex systems of flows that come together in multi-layered nodes.

KEYWORDS:

• Dispersed territories
• Eurometropolis Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai
• infrastructure networks
• infrastructure nodes
• urban transformation

Acknowledgments

The research published in this article was financially supported by KU Leuven and the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), grant number 1103522N.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A typical example of the cross-border impact of intervention in infrastructure nodes is the ongoing debate about a proposed highway bypass In Lille (France) that would severely increase truck traffic on local motorways in Tournai (Belgium). Considering this highway bypass as a node, a local intervention could thus relocate the problem to another place in the network.

2. The K-R8 project was started in 2019 to develop a regional spatial implementation plan for the R8 ring road of Kortrijk bringing together infrastructure, mobility, and spatial planning.

3. Diligences were horse-drawn carriages travelling between different towns or cities at regular times every few days. They can be considered one of the earliest forms of public transportation in the EM territory. By diligence, travelling from one destination to the other could take up to several days, due to the poor condition of the roads, bad weather and limited speed.

4. These streets have also been called ‘routes affluentes’ as they often linked the railway network to the road network, making up for a ‘ladder figure’ which up to today still strongly characterizes the urbanization of South-West Flanders (De Meulder et al. 2010, 116, 139).

5. CAFO is North American terminology, used in the absence of an official term in Europe. It refers to a large-scale animal feeding operation, which has recently been causing controversy in Flanders because of its polluting activities and poor living conditions for animals (Stevens and Boeykens 2020).

6. The term externalities was initially used in economics, to describe the beneficial impact of an activity on an unrelated third party (Pigou 1920). However, more recently this has become common terminology in the fields of urban design, planning and theory (Graham and Marvin 2001; Dehaene 2018; Gheysen, Van Daele, and Scheerlinck 2020; De Block and Polasky 2011; Morata et al. 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [1103522N].