Dernière mise à jour le 5 September 2019


“Bruxellization (in Dutch: verbrusseling) is a term used by urban planners to describe the anarchic development of an old city delivered to developers. This phenomenon owes its name to the city of Brussels, where it was particularly sensitive in the 1960s and 1970s, when the city was left to the dreams of uncontrolled developers as a city of the future.”


“It is not difficult to date the birth of the phenomenon in Brussels of the 1958 Universal Exhibition. In order to prepare the city, boulevards were built, tunnels dug, in short, Brussels entered the civilization of the car on the same level.”

“In the following years, a gigantic project was set up to transform the whole of the North Quarter, a working class district of Brussels near the North Station, into a kind of city of the future.”

“In the face of resistance from the local population, entire blocks of residential buildings were acquired and left to be abandoned until the last inhabitants fled and the building permit was granted tired of war.”

“The rotting method was then extended to the whole city, where office space tripled in 20 years.”


“Other cities had fallen prey to speculators in the past. Haussmann’s Paris, for example, has made it possible to make lucrative investments at the expense of the small people, who have been driven back to the Zone. But Haussmann’s Paris seemed to have an aesthetic alibi and the new avenues were not lacking in style.”

“Nothing like it in Brussels, where the vaulting of the Senne in the 19th century and the junction of the North and South stations in the 1930s had already left terrible scars in the urban fabric. In a way, the fact that the centre of Brussels had already been mutilated and had not really recovered made it easier for the developers.”