Brussel's Jonction as the Heart Valve in Belgium's Splintered Body

Abstract

Her topic is a junction between two different spots of railway arrivals in Brussels. It was built to connect the separated networks of the Northern and Southern railway which arrived in different parts of the city. The junction in this case had the potential to make the national net more efficient, but it was also a kind of stigma because the Northern and Southern railways of Belgium belonged to two different ethnic regions of the country, and the border run exactly through Brussels. The idea of uniting both stations to one main station was denied and alternatively offered a connection between both stations that they could stay as they were. This was why the construction of the junction cannot simply be considered as an act of technical or infrastructural completion of the net, but a project that caused some public attention and of course an offensive public debate, which was fired by protests against the necessary demolition of no fewer than 1,000 buildings. Despite the accompanying public excitement, the tunnel brought serious improvements in the efficiency of the Belgium railway network. This was not only the case for the national railway system but also for urban transport and for the commuters and the widespread use of railways by workers. The easy switch from the Northern to the Southern net in Brussels encouraged many of them to drop in from other parts of Belgium. After the junction had been introduced workers came from every area of the country for working in the capital without migrating to the city. So the junction brought a serious slow down of migration thanks to the increase of efficiency of the urban net of Brussels for commuting.