How a Territory Lost its Project: Automobility and the Liège-Aachen Diffuse City

The Liège-Aachen diffuse city can be defined by a common topography, soil properties, and water resources. It thus also shares ecological challenges made more acute through climate change, such as flooding, which highlight how geographically inherent solidarities are an ever more crucial factor for understanding our territories in a way that is meaningful to tackle the challenges of the transition. Despite these links, this territory features strong divisions, as can be observed in the morphology of settlements and road infrastructure. Indeed, to accompany the massive urbanisation process induced by the car, two radically different planning traditions have been pursued between Liège and Aachen since the 1960s: the banlieue radieuse ideal was accentuated in Belgium, while the German area became a laboratory for Christaller's central place theory. This resulted in very different settlement patterns, despite a rather similar built density. This contribution aims to address this gap in the research about this very type of transborder diffuse city through the lens of automobility as an accelerating factor for urban production, as well as discuss how post-car scenarios can be constructed to allow for the (re-)emergence of severed territorial solidarities.