Abstract
Urban activities such as housing, productive space, green space, offices, etc., compete for scarce urban land, especially in cities with population growth, such as London and Brussels. Thereby, low-value uses such as production have a more vulnerable position in a private property market governed by real estate dynamics in comparison to high-value uses such as offices and housing. While local authorities of post-industrial cities grow more susceptible to revitalizing their relationship with productive activities, they risk losing the space to do so due to industrial gentrification. Based on the disappearance of production space in the case of the Brussels Capital Region (BCR), this article aims at evaluating how the BCR supports urban production, with a clear focus on zoning and the provision of production space. Although the BCR is a post-industrial city, it continues to lose production space at a rapid pace. Employing an analytical framework of urban settlement patterns of production, we analyse the production-related zone typologies in inner-city areas as well as in more peripheral mono-functional and mixed areas of the BCR. Our analysis of the production-related zone typologies of the BCR land-use plan demonstrates that industrial gentrification plays an important role in current deindustrialization processes. This article presents zoning strategies to regulate the private property market as well as public land strategies to preserve urban production space.
Highlights
In the Brussels Capital Region (BCR) as well as in other European post-industrial cities, there is a contradiction between renewed policy attention for urban production since the financial crisis of 2008 and the empirical observation of ongoing deindustrialization
In the analysis of the USPPs, industrial gentrification emerges as the main driver of the decline of productive space in the BCR
The decline of production space in monofunctional areas is mainly driven by public authorities changing the land-use plan and transforming USPP-3 areas into mixed-use USPP-4 areas
Summary
In the Brussels Capital Region (BCR) as well as in other European post-industrial cities, there is a contradiction between renewed policy attention for urban production since the financial crisis of 2008 and the empirical observation of ongoing deindustrialization. The main research question of this article, is whether the zoning strategies of the BCR land-use plan contain protective measures to preserve urban production land. This final section presents two more ‘active’ public strategies to maintain production space: (1) expanding public production assets; and (2) the Community Land Trust (CLT) model, where long-term stewardship of affordable land replaces the barriers between ownership and leasing
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