Four characters in search of an author: Figures of automobility in the Liège-Aachen diffuse city

The system of automobility has been shown to play an important role in enabling the form of the contemporary urban environment. From a spatial point of view, techniques and social practices linked to the system of automobility lock-in a vast amount of surface – from circulation, parking, buildings for the car, to various storage and buffer zones – which, if activated, could play an important role in a transition project. Yet, in diffusely built areas, such projects are manifestly absent. These spaces, if they are to take part in the real-estate of a transition project, need a description which examines their typo-morphological qualities in detail, deciphering recurring features and make spatial repercussion of socio-technical systems explicit. This contribution presents four territorial figures which structure and characterize the spaces of automobility within the transborder case study of the Liège-Aachen diffuse city. Constructed from typo-morphological elements, they emerge from a variety of analytical operations: on site survey, palimpsest analysis, planning history, as well as confrontation with international references and models. Like characters in a play, these four figures need to be defined in their complex and sometimes contradictory state to take part in the future transformation of the territory.