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This explorative paper is an attempt to improve understanding of the material infrastructure and subjective affective investments into it. Building on the concept of “fetish”, it proposes a theoretical framework to analyse the entanglement of the functional, sensitive and social symbolic dimensions of Brussels’ “modern roads” to reinforce and stabilise a social imaginary of fast mobility. Examining technical reports, political discourses, press articles and cultural productions such as movies, TV broadcasts and photographs relating to the infrastructuring process, the paper reveals – beyond the case study – the aesthetic dimension of the modernisation of roads, which relates to symbolic investments in cars. The theoretical framework involves heuristic values when regarded beyond this specific Belgian context. It opens new possibilities for broader interpretations of the mobility infrastructure.

This article analyzes the dialectic of fast and slow mobilities as a continuous tension, since the mid-twentieth century, characterized by three evolutions of the functional, phenomenological, and social dimensions of mobility infrastructure and practices in Brussels, Belgium. It is based on the content analysis of diverse “embodiments” of social imaginaries: mobility infrastructures, narratives and sensory-motor behaviors, and images, movies, and photographs. It casts light on the great triple evolution of (1) the scale of the designed city; (2) the limits between spaces devoted to speed, slowness, and overlaps; and (3) the promoted aesthetics in terms of atmospheres and urban experience. These developments strongly relate to the changing meaning of slow and fast mobilities and to a broader change in the societal relationship to space and time.

In this paper, I study the sensory-motor effects of Brussels commercial galleries’ ambiance in the latter half of the 20th century. The analysis of two case studies (“Deux Portes” networked galleries and Agora Gallery) reveals the different logics of slow mobility acceleration and immobilisation at stake in the emerging modernist grammar of slow mobility. This grammar-in arrangement with the grammar of fast automobility − structures and stabilises the design of spaces for slowness next to the roadscape in spatial segregation of transport modes. There are accelerating and decelerating sensory dispositifs that define galleries both as punctual destination spaces that capture passers-by and as alternative paths for pedestrians: logics of multifunctionality, fast mobility accessibility and setting of an ambiance on the one hand, and logics of securement, spatial and qualitative continuities, on the other hand. Accelerating and decelerating dispositifs and logics facilitate movement to better keep the consumer captive. Then, I discuss the possible contribution of iconographic archives in research about past ambiances. They effectively acknowledge sensory- motor effects of ambiance but do not constitute an autonomous corpus to grasp sensitivity and reshape past ambiances.