ABSTRACT
Let me begin with the contemporary. To be specific, we start out in the Netherlands at the turn of the twenty-first century, with an experience most of my readers will be familiar with. In 1999, during a provocative speech for the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management, Francine Houben introduced the concept of the aesthetics of mobility as a new principle for spatial planning. Houben, architect and professor of architecture and mobility aesthetics at Delft University of Technology, pleaded for what she called an aesthetic rather than exclusively functional approach to designing roads and the spatial concerns related to mobility:
[W]e need instruments to realize this aesthetics of mobility. The existing practice of planning fails to do this. The aesthetics of mobility is an aesthetics of movement, of the state you’re in when being mobile. It is all about variation. With the alternation of different landscape elements you want to create an aesthetic effect, like the rhythm in a piece of music. 1
