Offices and planning in Brussels, a half-century of missed opportunities?
Notes de la rédaction
This is the press release related to the article from Michel De Beule, published on March 1, 2010. Read the article.
Functionalist” town planning could be summarised, in an extreme simplification of the school of thought, as dividing the city up into as highly specialised zones as possible. Brussels continues to bear the scars of the actions of those who, riding this theoretical wave, claimed to turn it into a modern city (see Brussels Studies 22 and 29).
Functionalism as an expression of human rationality in urban development needed to be backed up by a strong arm. This role was filled, very naturally, by town planning. In the 36th issue of Brussels Studies, Michel De Beule of the Brussels-Capital Region’s Office Property Review (Observatoire des bureaux de la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale) investigates the relationship between planning and the locations of office buildings in Brussels. Paying particular interest to the history of the European institutions’ establishment in Brussels, he analyses the ups and downs of planning. We learn from this review how Brussels escaped some fates worse than death: “The solutions put forward in this preliminary draft, which covers 320 km², are too radical to be presented to the public. Groupe Alpha wants to transform all of Brussels and its hinterland. It depopulates the city centre, [which becomes] airless, dark, and sunless. It redistributes housing according to specific rules and limits the peripheral neighbourhoods’ expansion by a green belt. Twelve satellite housing developments will allegedly keep the labour force that the capital needs within a 25 to 30 kilometre orbit.” Thankfully, we might almost say, there’s many a slip ’twixt ideas and implementation, and the transformation of part of the urban fabric into the European Quarter occurred through a pragmatic and erratic process. Hesitation over the site of the EEC’s headquarters encouraged a wait-and-see attitude and reliance on temporary solutions that became permanent.
The backdrop of this issue is the increase in and formidable concentration of office buildings in Brussels, with office space going from 615,000 m2 in 1949 to 1.3 million m² some ten years later and then 3.3 million m² at the end of the 1960s, i.e., a fivefold increase in just twenty years. What today appears as the destruction of a city took place without protest at the time, as residents willingly gave up their houses in the Leopold Quarter and its environs in exchange for huge capital gains. And plans (such as the famous Manhattan Plan – see Brussels Studies 29) continued to be drafted and urban expressways continued to attract ever more office buildings.
In 1970, a new preliminary area plan moderated the radicalism of the options that had been taken until then (demolition & reconstruction), without for all that settling the Leopold Quarter’s fate. This marked the start of a period of struggles and contestation over the anarchic establishment of offices in the capital. The country’s regionalisation and adoption of the area plan were unable, however, to stop the bulldozing trend known as “Bruxellisation”. Whilst the area plan gave up only one area, that of the European Quarter, to office buildings, it was actually unravelled by a myriad of exemptions over the next twenty years. So it is that at the end of 1999, 47% of the 10 million m² of offices (located in buildings of at least 1000 m² of floor space) was actually situated outside the administrative areas set in the area plan.
Today, what with the Regional Development Plan (PRD (in French) versions 1 and 2), Regional Land-use Plan (PRAS in French), master plans (Brussels Studies 30), real estate crisis, and booming residential property market, the time has come to ask about the future of planning. After a series of missed opportunities and planning failures, are we now going to see the controlled and democratic development of the city?
References
De Beule, Michel, “Offices and planning in Brussels, a half-century of missed opportunities?”, Brussels Studies [Online], General collection, No 36, 01 March 2010. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/brussels/754
Contact
Benjamin Wayens, Senior Editor: bwayens[at]brusselsstudies.be