Ingrid Schepers

• Doctoral defence: 11 June 2024 at 3 p.m.
  
• Promotiezaal, Klooster van de Grauwzusters
• Supervisors: Greet De Block and Ann Verhetsel

Abstract

In contemporary debates on sustainable environments, the intertwinement of transport policies, mobility flows and urbanisation patterns is common. In historical studies of mobility and migration, urbanisation, transport, planning and in historical geography, on the other hand, only aspects of this
tripartite are studied. This dissertation bridges that disciplinary gap by asking how the novel practice of governments to plan railway infrastructure top-down in the nineteenth century affected labour mobility and urban morphology. The double pioneering role in railway policies made Belgium a suitable case-study: Belgian policy makers were not only the first to build and finance a coherent public railway network, but they were also the first to support railway commuting on a national scale. In 1869, the Belgian government decided to create a national rural-urban continuum for solving the societal problems that overcrowding in the cities of the nineteenth century caused. To realise this spatial model, railway policies were developed that allowed rural households to remain in their village while having access to industrial and urban labour markets. By the early twentieth century, the strategy to make railway commuting an affordable alternative to labour migration for wage workers had led to a successful establishment of the intended rural-urban continuum, as studies on the use of cheap railway subscriptions demonstrated. Yet, the spatial patterns that the commuting and population data displayed for the years 1846 to 1961 refuted a straightforward link between gained railway access and rising commuting rates. The national scale of these empirical maps directed the attention to labour markets, livelihoods and rural agency, alongside transport technology's ability to deal with the friction of distance, as key variables in understanding home-work configurations. Moreover, William Cronon's identification of commodity markets as the linchpin around which nineteenth-century transformations of rural-urban landscapes revolved, led to the understanding that the rise of large-scale production and trade have turned commuting into an economic imperative to provide for a livelihood. Therefore, to prevent making mobility injustice a structural part of planned sustainable environments, requires an approach to commuting first as a contemporary necessity to provide for a livelihood and only then as a privilege to realise location preferences.