Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | In 1963 the Belgian Ministry of Communications published a document entitled «Promotion des Transports en commun dans les grandes agglomérations», real plea for the defence of public transport on the scale of five Belgian cities. In this article, we propose to analyze this document deeply, to help the understanding of the founding controversy which justified the works of future metro in Brussels. By studying institutional archives, we maintain that the Brussels metro may be considered as the result of a compromise between the two institutions dealing with mobility at that time in Brussels: the Ministry of Civil Engineering and the Ministry of Communications. Through responding to capacity and speed standards already present in the field of road transport, public transport gave up the surface and turned the debate on urban mobility into an apparently strictly technical solution. In this pacified space players of a now common field can understand each other and cooperate. |
