545 READING BRUSSELS’METROPOLIS BEYOND THE DIFFUSE CITY HORIZONTALISM AS OPERATIVE PROCESS FOR URBAN DESIGN Géry Leloutre Faculté d'Architecture de l'Université Libre de Bruxelles Università IUAV (co-direction) gery.leloutre@ulb.ac.be This paper analyses the mode of production of the city by focusing on the role of public and private real estate operators in Brussels metropolis during the second half of the twentieth century. Observing the evolution of Brussels’ territory reveals that the different public authorities share a same process, a process, which allows these operators to act on entire levels of urban development, plans. According to my hypothesis, the repetition of these operations on the territory contributes to the creation of a more coherent form than what Brussels’ historiography presupposed until now. In fact, this urban form may be apprehended in retrospect with the concept of “horizontalism”, this term deliberately implying a strong relation to spatiality. Horizontalism refers to a way to appreciate the city in which urbanity is not binded to the constant reconstruction or the congestion of a polarity. On the contrary, horizontalism refers to the interlacing of different urban forms on a same territory. It comes from the simultaneous action of real estate operators, managers and political decision-makers through a constant negotiation between capital holders, these operators’ capacity to act being possible because of a wide range of means which constitute the housing policy in Belgium. The Horizontal City Horizontality is often used to consider a broad urban condition that is the extensive urbanization of the Belgian territory known today as the “diffuse city”. This acknowledgment through the acceptance of the historicity of this urban phenomenon has required figuring out fabrication processes characterized by a strong dispersion and decentralization dimension. Therefore, understanding the horizontal city requires identifying the actors who contribute to its construction and the means underlying their actions. Each of these actors, public or private, at a societal or individual level, recreates an urban model, a specific conception of a vivre ensemble. This explains a strong character of the Belgian territory among others, namely the superimposition of contiguous elements supported at best by a sort of polite indifference. In any case, elements are put in a perpetual state of urban fringe despite the strong continuity of the streets’ pattern. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the development of the horizontal city is indeed inseparable from the continuous construction of a thick layer of transport infrastructures that may potentially activate the development of the whole territory. If the construction of infrastructure networks also proceeds from a particular form of decentralized decision —it is especially the case with the construction of local roads linking villages to railway stations 1386 or of the vicinal 1386 The case of stationstreets is particularly enlightening in this regard. The construction of these roads that link a station of the national railway network to a village were, on demand from local authorities, subsidized by the state. These roads supported a significant expansion of urbanization for the concerned municipalities. See Greet DE BLOCK, " Planning Rural-Urban Landscapes. Rails and Countryside Urbanization in South-West Flanders, Belgium (1830- 1930)", Landscape Researchart.nr. DOI: 10.1080/01426397.2012.759917 (2013)