#81: People just don't give a fuck

Brussels is the city we’ve made of it

Bin day in Brussels. I hope.

I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe newsletter about life in Brussels. If you like it and you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up here!

Happy New Year to all my subscribers, new and old. For the first month of 2025, I’m taking a look in a series of articles about the state of Brussels. The literal state of the place. Consider this me entering my crank era.

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I was standing outside the Relay newsagents on Place Miroir the other night, having walked up from home to look for a magazine which the shop didn’t stock. A man came out of the Café Sportwereld next door and made for where I was idling. Head down, collar up, and buffered from the cold by a thick coat and a fisherman’s hat pulled down over his ears, the cigarette hanging from his lips was burnt down nearly to the filter. Before opening the door to the shop he pulled the fag butt from his mouth and flicked it with thumb and yellowed forefinger onto the ground, grinding it into the slick wet paving with his heel.

I was gripped by the idea that I should say something, that I should alert him to his act of incivility and direct him to pick it up and throw it in one of the nearby bins. But of course I didn’t do this, because to do something like that in Brussels is to be insane, to have no concern for your own bodily integrity. And I value my bodily integrity. So I did nothing and and the discarded filter remained on the ground alongside all the other discarded filters from all the other smokers who just don’t give a fuck.

A minute or two later, still loitering outside the shop, I was alerted to the low rumbling of an obese silver Range Rover pulling up in front of me. The car’s indicator lights flashed amber as the driver inched it forwards on the square; the lights were flashing and the car was crawling along because the whole square is a priority-pedestrian space and the majority of it is explicitly car-free. This didn’t seem to matter to this driver; it was enough for him that his lights were flashing.

He swung open the driver’s door, climbed down and scuttled around to the back of the car to open its undersized boot. As he did so he upturned a silver drink can in his right hand and decanted its contents - an energy drink? - over the paving stones where the contents curdled into a bubbling pool. Then he unloaded his bags from the boot and his two children from the back seat, lights still flashing. After he and his partner had gone into an apartment building on the square, the car remained where it was, squatting provocatively on its little patch of recaptured territory.

Finally walking back home after my fruitless errand, I was crossing at the traffic lights on Avenue de Jette when I passed a young man heading back towards Place Miroir. He was about my height but a good 20 years younger judging by the downy outcrop on his upper lip. He wore a black beanie hat with goggle lenses stitched into the fabric, out from under which sprouted tufts of thick curly black hair. He had a practiced tough guy’s walk, all hips and elbows, and a younger less confident sidekick followed in his wake. He was opening a Kinder Bueno while walking and with his left hand he let the wrapper fall to the ground. He didn’t quite throw it to the floor, there wasn’t enough force in the gesture. But he did let go of it with such deliberate insouciance that it almost seemed like a provocation, that he was challenging passersby to call him, to dare to say anything to him. It was probably a long time since anyone had. And it would remain so; I put the head down and kept walking, burning all the same with the seething frustration of the impotent.

This is how it is in Brussels; people just don’t give a fuck about taking care of the place. The man with the cigarette, the one with his car where it didn’t belong, the little gurrier and his littering - it’s all of a piece, a pervasive, endemic problem with the way the city’s residents treat the place they live, whether out of carelessness, fecklessness, or malice. The two well-dressed young women I saw pull up in their car on the Jean Dubrucqlaan and dump bags and boxes of rubbish next to the glass recycling containers, in broad daylight? I’m not even sure they would have cognisant that what they were doing was flytipping and was illegal. It’s just the way things are done, isn’t it? It wasn’t their street, and anyway someone would come along and clean it away eventually.

On my three minute walk home down the Vanderborghtstraat I passed several dried out Christmas trees tossed out onto their sides on the footpath next to orange bins with half-rotten food waste and white bags pecked open by crows from the park next door. Rubbish that wouldn’t be collected for at least another two days. By the small litter bin at the end of the road someone had deposited the carcass of a broken shopping caddy and the bin itself was overflowing. People just don’t give a fuck.

Brussels is not a prideful city, and neither by extension are its residents. That’s a good thing; the city doesn’t really interfere in people’s lives, and the only real qualification to call yourself a Bruxellois is that you live here. It’s an inclusive approach to urban citizenship. But the darker flipside of this laissez-faire approach is that people also don’t take much pride in the city; few people are willing to take ownership of Brussels’ problems, and things are the way they are, because “they are the way they are”. Je m’en fous.

They might complain alright about the parlous state of Brussels’ streets; it’s one of the favourite pastimes of the city’s more online residents. They’ll say that the situation is out of control, that Brussels’ various layers of local government need to get a grip and do something - anything - about it, and they’ll illustrate their complaints with photos of piled up bin bags and videos of gangs of rats roaming the streets. In the election year just past there was a lot of rhetorical anger about public hygiene, with politicians lining up to say they were going to literally clean up the streets. That they would tackle flytipping with stricter surveillance and harsher fines; that the bin collection problem would be solved with underground containers, and littering with public awareness campaigns.

And then on Monday morning I’ll wake up to another article about the dreadful state of our city’s streets. But people just don’t seem to give a fuck. Brussels is the city we residents make of it. And we continue to make an absolute mess of it.

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