Brussels’ “Jonction Nord-Midi,” the Scar in the Body of the City

Abstract

It took a 115 years to build the Junction between Brussels’ Gare du Nord and Gare du Midi (north and south stations). The project was to connect the Belgian capital’s two main stations by an underground rail line. Its protracted labor left an urban scar still blamed today for Brussels’ failure to rival other European capitals. From 110,000 in 1830, year of the country’s foundation, the metropolitan area population has grown to just above 1 million today. The Junction, bisecting the original core of the city, the pentagon delineated by fourteenth-century fortifications, is blamed for the capital’s poor self-image (Figure 8.1). Today, the Junction is qualified as a “deep scar at the heart of the urban fabric.”1 The historian Thierry Demey’s phrases “anarchic, useless destruction” and “the worst constructions to which modern architecture has given birth” retain currency.2 The examination of this long-drawn project and its urban implications deviates from this book’s pattern of general exploration of a facet followed by a more focused case study. Instead, the Brussels chapters examine first the Junction as a painfully long and arduous project to connect two terminal stations with its social and urban consequences. The following, final chapter will place the Junction within its national context and suggest its role in Belgium’s current political configuration.