The Sensing of Urban Modernity

Ilja Van Damme, Senior Fellow.

For historian Ilja Van Damme, the question what it means to live in an urban world runs through centuries of human experience. As Professor of Urban History at the University of Antwerp, he explores how cities shape the rhythms, desires, and connections of modern life, and how, in turn, people have shaped the city as a place of encounter and imagination.

Ilja’s research traces the making of urban modernity from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. With a particular focus on Belgium, he looks at shopping streets, leisure spaces, and tourist destinations not just as physical settings. Rather, for him they are stages where changing ideas of community, creativity, and identity unfold. Thus, behind the history of consumption or public life lies a deeper inquiry: how did we become an urban species, and how has that transformation altered the way we live, think, and belong?

Thinking about the past in that way, for Ilja it can never simply be a matter of nostalgia. Following Søren Kierkegaard’s insight that “life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” he examines how historical patterns of urbanisation continue to shape contemporary cities – their inequalities, their aspirations, and their everyday negotiations of space.

At TRANSITION, he brings this historical perspective into dialogue with present-day debates about urban–rural change. His work is a reminder that decisions about cities and regions always carry echoes of earlier choices and visions, or as he puts it himself:

Urban policy decisions without knowledge of the past are usually bad decisions.

Born and based in Antwerp – a compact port city with global ambitions – Ilja finds both empirical subject and inspiration in walking its streets. Travel and observation remain his way of thinking, keeping one’s feet on the ground while studying how places evolve. Through this lens, he invites us to see urban history not only as a story of expansion and modernisation, but as an ongoing search for how people build meaningful lives together in changing environments.