Motorways, Nightclubs, and the Sound of Belgium: The Rural–Suburban Continuum as a Creative Terrain

TRANSITION talk with Ilja Van Damme, University of Antwerp.

Suburban spaces are often imagined as quiet, uniform extensions of the city. Yet recent scholarship challenges this view, showing how suburbs and rural–suburban areas can be dynamic terrains of cultural vitality.

In this Transition talk, Ilja Van Damme, Senior Fellow at TRANSITION and Prof. of Urban History at the University of Antwerp, explores how the late twentieth-century Belgian club scene reshaped our understanding of suburban creativity. Focusing on electronic dance music and the “sound of Belgium,” he demonstrates how nightclubs along motorways and in semi-rural settings became sites of cultural innovation, rivaling inner-city nightlife and influencing global techno scenes. By unpacking suburbia as a creative landscape, Van Damme invites us to rethink urban history from the outside in – highlighting how cultural production and modernity emerge not only in city centers, but also in the spaces that connect town, suburb, and countryside.

 

Recent urban historical and theoretical scholarship no longer treats suburbia as a mere extension or peripheral counterpart of the inner city. Earlier accounts, sustained by simplistic dichotomies, cast suburbs as “geographies of nowhere”: white, middle-class, and socio-spatially uniform, lacking the complexity attributed to historic urban cores. This perspective has increasingly been challenged by work that highlights the heterogeneity, layered histories, and cultural vitality of the rural-suburban continuum. A central theme in this revision has been the study of suburban cultural and creative practices – phenomena traditionally assumed to depend on scale, diversity, and density, and therefore thought to flourish exclusively within inner cities.

This Transition talk contributes to that shift by unpacking suburban spaces as creative terrains: dynamic sites of living, work, and creation, shaped in an ongoing interrelation and power balance with dominant urban cores. It advances a revisionist agenda of “suburbanizing urban history”: writing histories of urban transition and modernity from the outside in. To illustrate this approach, I present ongoing research into the suburban and peri-urban geographies of electronic dance music (EDM) in Belgium during the late twentieth century. While scholarship on creative industries often privileges inner-city districts, the Belgian case demonstrates how suburban and even rural spaces were equally constitutive of cultural innovation. Along motorways and in semi-rural /suburban settings, new clubs and music cafés flourished, drawing audiences away from traditional Belgian urban nightlife. Benefiting from cheap land, easy car access, and looser local regulations, these venues anchored the so-called “sound of Belgium” – meaning Belgian new beat and hardcore, which, for a short period of time between c. 1987 - c. 1992, managed to have a huge impact on the techno scenes worldwide. Rethinking suburban creativity thus reveals alternative trajectories of cultural production beyond the city core.

 

Bio

Ilja Van Damme’s research traces the cultural and social histories of cities and their hinterlands, with a particular focus on consumption, leisure, and creativity as drivers of urban change. He has published widely on cultural industries, suburban modernities, and the entangled histories of urban and rural life. His edited collection Creativity from Surburban Nowheres (together with Ruth McManus and Michiel Dehaene) displaces mainstream understandings of creativity and widespread stereotypes commonly associated with the suburbs by unpacking them as heterogeneous and historically layered places of living, work, and creation.

Sign up for the event.