Misunderstandings and fraught relations between developers, residents, local officials and the national, federal and regional arms of government contribute to "the trend of higgledy-piggledy bulldozing and rebuilding known as 'Bruxellisation'," the Brussels Studies report argues.
"Hesitation over the site of the [European Commission's] headquarters encouraged a wait-and-see attitude and reliance on temporary solutions that became permanent," the Belgian study concludes, suggesting that today's EU quarter "continues to bear the scars" of the "functionalist" town planning that led it to develop in a "pragmatic and erratic" manner, "in silence and without instruction".
Chief among the reasons for this, the report recalls, is the phenomenal growth in the number of office buildings in the city in the 1950s and 60s, when office space increased fivefold 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," according to the study's author, architect and town plannerMichel de Beule.
Indeed, the 'functionalist' development of Brussels has produced a city with areas that are "as specialised as possible," with "housing in one area, industry in another, offices in a third, and urban 'expressways' to serve all parts," his study argues.
The Brussels Studies report argues that member states' inability to quickly agree on a final destination for the European institutions at the inception of the European Economic Community hindered the development of a purpose-built European quarter in Brussels and led to temporary solutions becoming permanent.
"Inserting the administrative complex willy-nilly into an already inhabited neighbourhood was deemed preferable to building a convenient but no doubt overly ostentatious complex on an unoccupied site," De Beule remarks, concluding that "politics has reasons that planning cannot fathom".
Brussels' EU quarter is set for another major facelift following the unveiling last year of proposals to create a "symbolic area for the EU institutions," giving "body and soul to the European political project" and providing the European Commission with much-needed office space, in the words of Siim Kallas, a vice-president of the EU executive (EurActiv 06/03/09).
At present, the Rue de la Loi area, where the European Commission is situated, is one of the city's busiest thoroughfares and features a huge tunnel linking central Brussels to the motorway system. "I am not in favour of keeping the current motor canyon," Minister-President of the Brussels Capital Region Charles Picqué said last year, "but we have to respect the challenge. It's about mobility with functional constraints".
De Beule, meanwhile, concludes by arguing that after series of "missed opportunities" and against a backdrop of a real estate crisis and booming residential property market, "the time has come to ask about the future of planning".
