More than a “Circulation Machine”

In modernist urbanism, transport infrastructure bore one of the four essential urban functions and was described as a “circulation machine,” in a well-known formulation by Le Corbusier. Yet the history of urban plans of Antwerp (1933) in Belgium and the twin-cities of Slavonski and Bosanski Brod (1945) in Yugoslavia open a valuable perspective on the ways in which modernist architects incorporated the geography and politics of infrastructure into city planning. Rather than urban highways being merely subsumed under the “fourth function” of “circulation,” the city as a whole was understood as an infrastructural extension and an element in a functional relationship with its environment. This chapter describes how this “other” functionalism of modernist urbanism was prefigured by applied human geography in the first half of the twentieth century and how it unfolded both through direct references to the scholarship of human geography and through shared political-economic requirements defined by free trade and state security on an ever-larger scale. In the case of inter-war Antwerp, planners explicitly discussed infrastructure as a political technology, one that tied geographies, economies and imaginaries into harmonious global scenarios. Then, in the context of Cold War Brods, Yugoslav planners recalibrated infrastructure as a tool of economic growth through territorial development, taking advantage of that nation’s geopolitical and geographic middle ground. In both cases, infrastructure emerged as more than a “circulation machine,” even if both were emblematic examples of modernist urban planning.