Abstract
Lying in the Senne River Valley, the North Quarter of Brussels is a physical record of spatial transformations unevenly distributed over time. Waves of developments and unfinished plans colonized its original landscape structure, erasing, writing, and re-writing it with large-scale metropolitan projects and transportation systems, around which an industrial and urban fabric developed. Accumulated expansions left an assemblage of incomplete infrastructures in which a multi-faceted and highly identifiable quarter lies punctuated by weakly defined morphological mismatches. At the center of this diverse and mutilated fabric, Maximilien Park stands as pars pro toto. From a combination of research methods that includes ethnographic fieldwork and interpretative mapping, three drawings are overlaid with the moving dimensions of space, time, and people, and assembled in a reinterpreted triptych to investigate the production of that public space. The first panel “Traces” overlaps lost urban logics and remaining traces on the urban tissue. The second panel “Cycles” traces the uneven deconstruction of the North Quarter during the last century, identifying scars of its past. The third panel “Resignifications” focuses on recent events in the area, examining how people have appropriated and transformed the park since 2015. With this triptych, the article aims to re-interpret the palimpsest of the North Quarter, represent the area’s transforming character, and unravel a spatial reading of the lived experiences of the place through time.
Highlights
Issue This article is part of the issue “Territories in Time: Mapping Palimpsest Horizons” edited by Chiara Cavalieri (UCLouvain, Belgium) and Elena Cogato Lanza (EPFL, Switzerland)
Looking at the recent history of the North Quarter, a neighborhood of Brussels physically enclaved between regional infrastructures, and using Maximilien Park as a spatial anchor in its fabric, this study is an empirical investigation on permanence and ephemerality in the development of urban intersections
The second panel, “Cycles,” traces back a century of urban regeneration in the North Quarter, unfolding cyclical changes that alternate between components of decay and reclaim, further generating residues open to resignification
Summary
In his analogy between land and palimpsest, Corboz (1983) stresses the multiple processes that constantly shape and reshape a territory, oscillating between natural transformations and human activities. Urban Planning, 2020, Volume 5, Issue 2, Pages 249–261 and Yaneva (2008) pursue this conceptualization around the movement of space, and condemn conventional architectural representations limited to three-dimensional Euclidean space. They deplore the traditions of picturing buildings as static objects and omitting the complex environment in which physical spaces keep transforming (Latour & Yaneva, 2008). Looking at the recent history of the North Quarter, a neighborhood of Brussels physically enclaved between regional infrastructures, and using Maximilien Park as a spatial anchor in its fabric, this study is an empirical investigation on permanence and ephemerality in the development of urban intersections. Through a casebased process of mapping that is subjective and interpretative, this article aims to present an alternative and differentiated reading of neighborhoods under transformation, showing how perpetual everyday rhythms play an important role in the iterative cycle of urban construction, and how in turn, the spatial layout of a place determines the conditions in which everyday life unfolds
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