Electrifying Overmere: the establishing of the Belgian utility systems in a perspective of urbanisation

This paper presents the history of the electrification of Overmere from 1900 until the end of the 1920s. At that time Overmere was nothing but a typical, small village in rural Flanders. Yet the history of its power grid makes it possible to reflect on the historical urbanisation process of Flanders and the region’s contemporary urban condition. In establishing and developing the electricity network in Overmere many different actors were involved and each of them operated according to a particular conception of the region, based on the motives, scale, topologies, etc… specific to that actor. The network can be interpreted as the hybrid result of, or the precarious balance found between different strategies of territorialisation. This balance is not only visible in the physical construction and expansion of the network, but also left its traces in the cultural habits that in time came to surround the network and determined the various ways in which it would come to be embedded in everyday life. Retracing the history of such a dynamic balance, with respect for its aspects of contingency and co-evolution, sheds a light on the different deep-seated urbanisms, the imaginaries they entail, and the varying territorialisations at play in Flanders and thus on the processes of urbanisation in weakly-integrated urban areas such as Flanders