It’s hard to get a sense of Brussels at street level. It’s all just a little too chaotic, too loud, the streets too close in and the horizon too far away. You get a much better look at the place from the air, flying in low over the city towards the airport in Zaventem.
Approaching from the west, Brussels maybe looks a little like an island, a gray irruption of glass and steel, concrete and asphalt rising from the sludgy green Brabantian morass from which it emerged a millennium ago. Maybe not one island but an archipelago of volcanic peaks bursting up through the green fields of Brussels’ Flemish hinterland and strung out in a ragged line along the Brussels-Charleroi canal - bookended by the Midi tower at Zuid station, Uplace at Noord, and outliers along Avenue Louise and on the Heysel plateau.
But, looking down on Brussels from a height, the idea of it as an island unto itself isn’t quite right, because it’s clear, in the way that it’s hard to tell from up high where Brussels exactly ends and Flanders begins, that it is not isolated. Instead, maybe Brussels is the nucleus at the centre of a hub-and-spoke nervous system. As we fly low over the outer edges of the city, smaller grey blobs appear Places with names like Ninove, Aalst, Asse, Zottegem, and Halle - though I can’t from here tell one from the other. These Flemish settlements are connected to Brussels by dendritic ribbons of railway tracks and steenwegen. They look like synaptic outriders, satellite nerve cells spun out of the big city in an irregular pattern. It looks orderly, with Brussels at the centre directing the operations of its remote terminals at the periphery.
Of course, anyone who knows Brussels knows this order is a mirage. Brussels has no centre, and those suburban towns are very much not under its control. The city might once have clustered around the canal as the medieval city’s artery to surrounding dukedoms and prince bishoprics, but those days are long since past. As Brussels crept slowly away from the canal and the Senne river, absorbing villages like Etterbeek, Watermael, and Ganshoren it became itself a city of villages, a fractured metropolitan of 19 little fiefdoms under the tenuous control of a regional administration.
Maybe Brussels is actually, in this way, more like an octopus, a 19-tentacled cephalopod with each of its semi-autonomous appendages living in an uneasy cohabitation with each other. A truce that more often than not breaks down into counterproductive squabbling. And because of this internecine competition, Brussels - unlike the octopus - rarely amounts to the sum of its parts.
Where those parts that are Brussels end and the parts that are Not Brussels begin is not very clear from my vantage point several thousand feet in the air. On the ground, though, the difference is clear and present. There is Brussels and there is its Flemish hinterland, and though the former is officially the capital of the latter, they are not the same. Streets go from having one name to two, or vice versa. Bike lanes appear abruptly or disappear just as suddenly, depending on which direction you’re going, and in which corner of the city you find yourself. Footpaths expand and contract, and the colour of the asphalt changes. A yellow iris tells you you’re entering Brussels, and a black lion says “welcome to Flanders”. If you’re transiting from Anderlecht (Brussels) into Dilbeek (Flanders), you’ll be welcomed - or warned - with a sign saying this where “the Flemish are AT HOME.”
Out there, beyond the motorway that partially encircles Brussels, the city doesn’t look like an island, or a big brain. It looks like a threat. Or maybe a tumour. A cancer of the bodies politic and cultural, corrupted by urban decay, administrative malfeasance, and demographic diversity. English writer Iain Sinclair once described London’s own orbital motorway - the M25 - as a “security collar fixed to the neck of a convicted criminal … [that] enforces a nocturnal quarantine” protecting the Home Counties. To mix metaphors a little, some in the Flemish towns on the other side of the Brussels Ring might feel that quarantine has failed. That the same network of roads and rail that bring their residents to their jobs in Brussels are now also a vector for a metastatic infiltration of their communities by the big city’s urban malignancies - poverty, crime, linguistic diversity, and cultural heterogeneity. Some of these towns on the edge of Brussels are avowedly Not Brussels and would quite like to stay Not Brussels, thank you very much.
What is Brussels? Maybe it’s an experiment gone awry, what happens when you graft - by accidents of history and alphabetisation - the major political institutions onto a dysfunctional provincial capital of a fractious northern European country. Maybe Brussels is a Land of Contradictions. One of the most diverse cities on the planet and Belgium’s only true claim to global urban relevance, but run by 19 warring village councils. A city where over 100 languages are spoken but where only two are legally recognised, and barely at that.
A city where almost everyone can trace their roots back to somewhere else, somewhere which has no particular identity and to which its residents often appear ambivalent about, but which nevertheless can cause people to defend it vociferously. A city of intractable poverty located in one of the richest regions in Europe. A place that’s become synonymous with bureaucratic niggling, but which appears congenitally incapable of getting its own residents to follow the most basic of rules.
What is Brussels? The only thing I know for certain is that it’s the place I’ve lived for 15 years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere. It’s an exhausting, baffling, enervating place to live.
I can’t say that I love it, but I can say that I’ll probably never leave.
I’ll die here, if it doesn’t kill me first.
Miscellaneous notes
The header image comes from a puzzle we bought years ago - possibly from the now-defunct puzzle shop on Rue Beillard. It’s hard and addictive, and a great way to discover places in Brussels you’ve never heard of.
Cleaning up the house yesterday I found an old copy of Bruzz from May 2018 - also an election year, and was interesting to see the political headlines haven’t changed all that much in six years - red v blue for the control of Brussels!
Looking forward - if I can sort some babysitting to going to listen to Emmanuel Carrère at Bozar early next month. A great one for all the essay lads.
As for my own work, I haven’t published anything yet on Brussels Beer City, but there is some more diaspora content in the works so keep an eye out.