Brussels New Pedestrian Area: The Way Toward a Slow City? ( breakout presentation )

Abstract

In 2015, Brussels city transformed an important part of the Anspacht Boulevard and some of its nearest streets, in the city center, into a pedestrian area. A temporary spatial arrangement was set up during more than a year in order to test the impact of such a spatial transformation on the urban economic and social dynamics and on the mobility system. After this experimentation period, the results communicated by the city authorities seem to be rather positive. Therefore, the city plans to start the implementation of a new spatial design that will definitely transform the car boulevard into a complete pedestrian street, even if this decision goes against the opinion of some citizens, storekeepers and urban professionals. The presentation that I propose aims to explore the Brussels pedestrian area project as a potential of new urban transformations. I will start with explaining how the train, then the car, have transformed the center of Brussels. Indeed, those fast modes have been driving forces for the transformation of spatial, social and economic structures of Brussels. Starting from the understanding of this evolution, we will explore the potential of the pedestrian area to be a new driving force to transform Brussels, as the train and the car infrastructures were in the past. The hypothesis I propose is that Brussels is at the beginning of a new era, where slowness can be a factor of urban development, like speed was in the past. I will present a short analysis of the pedestrian area project as it was designed and set up. I will show the limits of the projects as it is today by focusing on the tension between the new slowness logics brought up by the project and the speed and cars logics that still influence decision making in the city design field.