The Europeanization of Brussels and the Urbanization of ‘Europe’

Abstract

Regeneration practices in the EU district in Brussels clearly reveal how a mismatch has grown between Brussels’ economic and cultural globalization and its political-institutional parochialization. Brussels’ global mission is being inserted into well-tested local formats of urban governance that have existed throughout the postwar period. Local powerbrokers continue to form remarkable economic growth coalitions that are successfully manoeuvring through obstacles that would prevent them from cashing in on Brussels’ internationalized economy through property development. Any government strategy that would deal with the rapid internationalization of Brussels and the EU district - socially, economically, culturally or politically - is simply absent. Important segments of Brussels’ social fabric are excluded from participation in public political and cultural life. Meanwhile, the success of extreme right-wing parties - which are fiercely contesting the multiculturalization of Brussels - has risen to alarming levels, while different cultural groups in Brussels are de facto generating hybridized cultural expressions which might form the base of a new modus vivendi of community, citizenship, economy and politics.