Reading the Edge
Tracing Water, People, and Fragmented Memory at Antwerp’s Margueriedok
H. Hoffmann (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
C.M. Hein – Mentor (TU Delft - History, Form & Aesthetics)
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Abstract
This thesis examines the Margueriedok - Antwerp's last tidal dock still connected to the Scheldt - as a material site of fragmented memory, suspended infrastructure, and evolving urban-water relations. Using a method of partial reading that combines field observation, archival analysis, and critical theory, the project interprets three site fragments: a blue stone quay wall, a truncated railway line, and the Dutch Pilotage Building. Each chapter explores how these remnants embody past regimes of circulation, control, and resistance, revealing tensions between heritage and redevelopment, memory and erasure. Rather than reconstructing a linear history, the thesis foregrounds ambiguity, material latency, and spatial entanglement as crucial tools for rethinking post-industrial waterfronts. In doing so, it challenges dominant narratives of urban transformation that prioritise clarity, accessibility, and security over complexity, contradiction, and historical depth. The Margueriedok is presented not as a ruin, but as an active assemblage - one that resists easy erasure and invites alternative readings of how cities remember, forget, and relate to water.