Flemish Diamond or ABC-Axis? The spatial structure of the Belgian metropolitan area

This contribution traces the evolution of the Belgian urban system by adopting a historical taxonomy of agglomeration-economy regimes, and poses the question whether a new centralizing agglomeration-economy regime based on renewed ‘metropolization’ can be observed. Belgium has federalized into three regions during the last decades and different spatial perspectives emerged about how the central metropolitan area crosscuts the regional borders. After placing Belgian metropolization in its historical context, we engage with its contemporary geography. We inquire if the metropolitan area of Belgium is more akin to the ‘Flemish Diamond’, with capital city Brussels as the southernmost node, or whether a spatial pattern reminiscent of the historical ‘Antwerp-Brussels-Charleroi (ABC)-Axis’ is a more adequate description. To answer these questions, we examine the spatial integration of the Belgian labour market utilizing the connectivity field method and a 2010 nationwide travel-to-work data set. Based on this analysis, inferences are drawn about labour market interdependencies between various parts of the urban system. The results indicate that contemporary metropolization in Belgium can be topographically expressed as an area that is more trans-regional than the Flemish Diamond yet more polycentric than an extension of Brussels, thus pointing to renewed economic centralization tendencies at the supra-regional level.