#87: Chaotic City
Is Brussels chaotic because of how it's built, or built how it is because it's chaotic?
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!
This week’s newsletter is a is close to wrapping up this little mini series on the state of Brussels. We took a ferris wheel ride above the city to get a better view of the chaos below.
In the pantheon of great urban skylines, Brussels ranks pretty low. It’s built largely in the drained basin of a swamp, and its concave topography allied to its generally low-rise profile means there’s not much that really sticks out. And what does stick out often does so not so much for its architectural appeal or impressiveness but for its ugliness or the sheer grotesquery of its size.
It is a city of rare, modest skyscrapers that instead of going tall just went big, being home to one building that was once the largest in the world when it was built, and another that was the fifth largest church. The Palais de Justice on Place Poelaert and Koekelberg’s Sacred Heart Basilica do a good job of bookending the city from the east and west, both perched on the lip of the Zenne river basin. From our vantage point at the apex of the ferris wheel on Brussels’ Christmas market, on the first, grey weekend in January, Z and I could see the corpulent domes of both, and more besides - the TV tower over by Diamant, the Zuidtoren, and the ugly curved shell of the Sablon tower. We hadn’t taken the ferris wheel for the view, which was just as well. The last weekend of November, we’d visited the market, which sets up on the Vismarkt every year, with the children. Neither of them had ever ridden a ferris wheel in previous years, and N had no desire to this year either.
Z was another story. She wanted to ride the wheel because it was there, and she’d never done it before. So we tried and failed to queue up for a ticket, thwarted by a long line that looped over and back on itself through a series of metal fences. I’d promised Z we would ride the ferris wheel before the holidays were over; it’s a promise I’d made once before and failed to keep. Breaking it a second time would likely have been fatal for me. Fortunately for us, postponing our trip until the very last minute, the final Saturday before the ersatz wooden alpine cabins went into hibernation for another year, meant that when we arrived early on Saturday afternoon there was no queue to navigate. The market had all but run out of puff and everyone who wanted to visit had already done so. Before I think either of us were ready for it we were ascending jerkily in a pendulous metal cage. We were both of us a little reluctant. Me, because like Joseph Cotten I once had an uncomfortable experience on the big wooden wheel in Vienna’s Prater park after which I’d retained a wariness for ferris wheels; her, because she’d never done it before and had a furtive aversion to heights.
We hadn’t checked how many rotations our ticket was worth, so we sat there in the suspended quiet, interrupted only by her quick breath and the creaking of old joints. We jumped over and back on the wooden benches so we were always facing front. The cabin’s polycarbonate windowpanes warped the view so it looked at the edges like a glossy reproduction from a heavy coffee table book.
Ours wasn’t the best vantage point to take in the whole of Brussels, being at the lowest point of the basin. The ferris wheel stands where 200 years previously the Brussels-Charleroi canal diverted into a dead-end harbour. Instead of the peaked roofs of Potemkin chalets, we would have seen below us barges tied fast to a quayside, swarthy stevedores rolling barrels down the gangplanks of barges and across lumpy cobbled quays past the parched throats of drunkards eagerly awaiting the latest delivery to whichever of the dingy drinking hovels that lined the canal was theirs. Only the Cheval Marin, with its wrought iron seahorse hanging from the bar’s ornate facade on the corner of the Fish Market and the Pig Market Street, remains of this part of Brussels’ boisterous maritime history.
At ground level it’s hard to make sense of Brussels sometimes; the city’s history of urban ruptures means parallel streets can be very different, nevermind neighbouring quarters. And though there was nothing outstanding to point at, the city became more legible once we’d reached the top of the wheel. Though layers of slapdash urban accretions might hide it, from up high I was reminded that Brussels is a city of valleys, rising and dipping with the course of rivers that carved themselves into soft Brabantian bedrock millenia ago. Streams the names of which have survived but whose riverbeds have all but vanished - the Maalbeek, the Roodebeek, the Etterbeek, the Schaarbeek, and the biggest of all, the Zenne.
When you consider what Brussels has done to these rivers - polluted them, buried them, diverted them, diminished them to the status of rainwater overflows - it’s as if the city is embarrassed by its rivers. The humiliation of the Zenne - the river on which Brussels was born and which for centuries connected it to the outside world, before it became rancid and choleric and city governors banished it below ground and abandoned it - is a prime example of this civic shame.
It’s not quite accurate to say that Brussels is a city without a river; there are traces of the Woluwe, the Molenbeek, and even the Zenne on the city’s periphery, if you know where to find them. And when it rains hard, the old rivers bloat and the swamp rises again to submerge lower-lying parts of the city. It’s more accurate instead to say that Brussels is a city that has lost its rivers, lost and forgotten them. We walk over their graves everyday, navigating the echoes of their long extinguished streams, but cannot find any hint of water. We’re like dowsers who’ve lost their rods, instinctively knowing there is water out there somewhere but unable to find the source.
The big river, the great waymarker of the city, should be there but is not. Maybe it’s because I come from two - Irish - cities where the river is so determinant in their respective psychogeographies that I put so much store in the organising potential of a body of water. The canal does its best as the Zenne’s understudy, but it’s too straight, its artificiality meaning it acts more as a barrier than a useful means of navigating. The river’s simultaneous presence and absence goes someway to explaining why Brussels can be such a confusing place to navigate.
The confusion and all-consuming chaos that permeates Brussels’ streets is sometimes hard to fully grasp at ground level, but easier to interpret when looking down from on high at its lumpy, higgledy-piggeldy skyline. From the top of the ferris wheel you could see the straight lines cut through the city during its brief flirtation with Haussmannian order. You can also see how this kind of city planning didn’t really take. The city’s leaders built the long, straight boulevards alright, just like their Parisian counterparts - over the putrid corpse of the Zenne. Only, instead of lining them with repetitive rows of multistorey mansard-rooved apartment blocks, they ran competitions to see who could build the most exotic and exuberant row house mansions. The result is a cacophonous architectural chaos where no two neighbouring buildings are exactly the same, roofs at different heights and different angles, every facade a twist or turn on the previous one. This freewheeling attitude to urban planning creeped out from the centre and infiltrated the suburbs and we’re now left with a Brussels where it's the rare house that is the same as another one on its streets.
Are Brussels’ streets chaotic because the city is chaotic by instinct, condemned by its very nature, to slough off Hausmann’s rigid grey uniform in favour of a more dayglow, loosey-goosey exuberance. Or do these chaotic streets, its riverless valleys, alter something in the collective brain chemistry of the city’s residents? Who’s to say? I had no answer to this when we were hanging 30m up in the air, and I still had none when we returned to earth after we completed our third and final rotation.