Through Liège’s Motorways. Revealing River Slope Landscapes on the Edge of High- speed Lines

As the speed of travel has increased, the debate on infrastructure has shifted on purely technical aspects related to the construction of an object. In a time of rethinking local economies, however, there is a change in perspective: the road may be required to do something more than the increasingly technically perfected functional response that caused its birth. In Belgium, infrastructural policies have always been determining in development. In the catchment area of the Meuse, the evolution of travelling – first on national roads, railways and canals and, finally, motorways – particularly intersects with geomorphological conditions that have always stimulated identification with environment and interactions with resources. The agglomeration of Liège – with the growth and recent decline of its industrial district – thus presents itself as an interesting laboratory for investigating the relationship between infrastructures and crossed territories. Focusing on the relationship between infrastructures and river slopes – assumed as relevant component of landscape continuity between plateau and valley characterizing Liège – the contribution proposes a diachronic exploration of the agglomeration’s palimpsest, investigating the road as a spatial and social ‘process’. A cartographic apparatus allows to compare different attitudes of interpreting – through the infrastructure – slope condition and reveals different principles of interaction – adhesion or underlining, incision and negation – between line of motion and declivity. At the same time, the shift from an equilibrium towards a capacity for dissociation from the constraints imposed by the terrain, detects the emergence – transversal to the most recent infrastructures – of new slope conditions, as current potential resources for populations. In perspective, the contribution reflects on the meaning we could attribute to infrastructure, moving from the idea of connection towards that of relation, from a mono-functional link to something that could instead return to belonging to the community, as a set of distinct places held together by a single trajectory.