When I lived in Liverpool, the kids would set the fireworks off horizontally from cardboard rolls, like rocket launchers... impressive if highly dangerous.
Down in the leafy south things are a bit calmer, no afcon excitement, for good or for bad!
Brilliant piece on collective urban anxiety. The insight about sublimated frustration over political dysfunction manifesting as public hysteria is spot on, dunno why more people don't conect those dots. Living in a city during similar tensions, the smallest disruptions felt monumental because the bigger systemic issues couldn't be adressed. What's striking is how normalized the febrility becomes when governance is absent.
The inflexion point of Brussels's overall collective mental decline wasn't small disruptions not being taken care of, but a rather large one that has also impacted countless other parts of the world : Covid-19 and especially the latter lockdowns. We had particularly harsher set of measures that involved curfews that lasted for months at one point in the 2nd or 3rd lockdown, then also that very last one where I saw my boss decompose mentally once it dawned on him we were going back into a genuine lockdown. Suddenly the poorest were left to their own devices in some of the most cramped, densely populated housing (and the rainiest weather) in Western Europe while politicians were able to go back to the 4-sided villa in one of the two Brabants and bake banana bread and clap from their window. In contrast to this class distinction though, almost everyone rich and poor became a social media or screen addict that has led to the toxic local, regional and federal politics : radicalised blockheads turn up to local council meetings to record themselves posturing, while one of the most powerful politician, a serial user of twitter/X by then, in the country essentially became a standard issue sillicon valley-baked nihilio-libertarian Musk-loving far right disruptor whereas his politics were a tad more interesting before, and he was rewarded with +10% in elections.
Covid completely broke people's positivity of the city that was growing from the 2010s. A lot of urban affluent types realised they wanted a garden, Brussels became an even more transient city than before as a result, and the finances of the city weren't helped at all by it (but hey at least Italy, apparently more of a victim than Covid than anyone else, got money to renovate its football stadia - what you get for voting far right and acting like the UK pre-Brexit I guess!).
Again though all of the above could be said about many other places after Covid. But in Brussels you had a fragile progress that was completely butchered by such an event whereas some cities thrive.
When I lived in Liverpool, the kids would set the fireworks off horizontally from cardboard rolls, like rocket launchers... impressive if highly dangerous.
Down in the leafy south things are a bit calmer, no afcon excitement, for good or for bad!
Brilliant piece on collective urban anxiety. The insight about sublimated frustration over political dysfunction manifesting as public hysteria is spot on, dunno why more people don't conect those dots. Living in a city during similar tensions, the smallest disruptions felt monumental because the bigger systemic issues couldn't be adressed. What's striking is how normalized the febrility becomes when governance is absent.
The inflexion point of Brussels's overall collective mental decline wasn't small disruptions not being taken care of, but a rather large one that has also impacted countless other parts of the world : Covid-19 and especially the latter lockdowns. We had particularly harsher set of measures that involved curfews that lasted for months at one point in the 2nd or 3rd lockdown, then also that very last one where I saw my boss decompose mentally once it dawned on him we were going back into a genuine lockdown. Suddenly the poorest were left to their own devices in some of the most cramped, densely populated housing (and the rainiest weather) in Western Europe while politicians were able to go back to the 4-sided villa in one of the two Brabants and bake banana bread and clap from their window. In contrast to this class distinction though, almost everyone rich and poor became a social media or screen addict that has led to the toxic local, regional and federal politics : radicalised blockheads turn up to local council meetings to record themselves posturing, while one of the most powerful politician, a serial user of twitter/X by then, in the country essentially became a standard issue sillicon valley-baked nihilio-libertarian Musk-loving far right disruptor whereas his politics were a tad more interesting before, and he was rewarded with +10% in elections.
Covid completely broke people's positivity of the city that was growing from the 2010s. A lot of urban affluent types realised they wanted a garden, Brussels became an even more transient city than before as a result, and the finances of the city weren't helped at all by it (but hey at least Italy, apparently more of a victim than Covid than anyone else, got money to renovate its football stadia - what you get for voting far right and acting like the UK pre-Brexit I guess!).
Again though all of the above could be said about many other places after Covid. But in Brussels you had a fragile progress that was completely butchered by such an event whereas some cities thrive.