#97: The Slow Euthanisation of Brussels

In defence of the frivolous city

Thanks for reading - 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 brief break from regular programming - because sometimes you just have to get something off your chest.

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Sometimes, you read an article that makes you angry. So angry you jettison your newsletter’s editorial schedule and spend your morning commute seething over and typing into your notes app. Yesterday morning I read that Flow, Brussels’ seasonal outdoor swimming pool, announced it was closing permanently. They would see out their programme of cold water swims and saunas until the end of May, at which time the city’s only outdoor swimming pool - run, for the past five years, by a hardy activist collective - will be gone, with no perspective on a permanent solution in the near-future.

I wasn’t surprised by their decision; If anything, I was surprised they had managed to hold out for so long. Flow was always intended as a temporary project, as much an actual pool for swimming in as it was a symbolic cudgel to nudge city politicians to come up with a more durable solution. On the former, it was a success. On the latter, as they admit themselves in their goodbye message, it was not. But not for want of effort - which should infuriate every Brussels resident. Not just because of the immediate disappearance of the only outdoor swimming pool in a city of over one million, but because it feels like just one more casualty of the gradual asphyxiation of a more creative, frivolous kind of Brussels by the unambitious and unimaginative people who run the city.

Brussels is no easy place for optimistic, enterprising citizen activists who want to effect positive change in their city. Flow is a good case study of why that is. Created by the NGO Pool Is Cool, Flow was the answer to the question: why can other European cities build outdoor swimming facilities for their residents, but Brussels cannot? Considering the city authorities insufficiently interested or flat out uninterested, they determined to do it themselves. The project followed a trajectory familiar to anyone with experience of civic activism in Brussels.

First comes a flurry of enthusiasm and action, and if they’re lucky their issue may be co-opted by someone in power and some form of action is taken. A good example of this was the pedestrianisation of Brussels’ central boulevards in the late 2010s, which came about because a couple of politicians decided to build on rather than ignore a citizen-driven push to give the streets back to people. The alternative scenario is that, because of political or bureaucratic indifference or hostility, the initiative is left to wither, reliant on the energies of involved citizens and what subsidies they can scrounge together. But in the absence of institutional buy-in, what inevitably happens is that, after several years they understandably run out of puff and the initiative peters out if there isn’t a new generation of fellow-travellers willing to shoulder the organising burden.

This dynamic has played out on my doorstep on several occasions. For several years before the pandemic, a group of local residents in conjunction with the nearby Dutch-language cultural centre ran a pop-up summer bar in an abandoned pavilion in Parc Elisabeth. Bar Eliza, as it was called, proved extremely popular with the young families in the surrounding streets who craved this kind of community space. But the local council shuttered the project in 2019, promising imminent “extensive renovations” to the building. Construction works finally commenced in early 2025, and it’s still not clear whether - and in what form - the council intends to revive Bar Eliza.

During the pandemic itself there was another upsurge in citizen activism as people attempted to retool the city to cope with lockdowns and travel bans. Streets were closed off and reappropriated from car traffic to host ersatz playgrounds, festivals and other social gatherings intended to strengthen community connections. For a time, the noise of raucous street parties replaced the revving of engines and the beeping of horns. But again, in the absence of local government bodies willing to take over the organisation of these initiatives, they were reliant on motivated citizens - in this case, frequently already-overburdened young parents. The speelstraten - “play streets” - eventually fizzled out as people redirected their energies elsewhere as Covid receded as an immediate threat.

Local authorities in Brussels just appear incapable or unwilling to harness citizen-driven initiatives, in ways that are undermining the city’s ability to pull itself out of the hole in which it currently finds itself. A part of this is down to the fact, I think, that the two dominant political dispensations in Brussels have no real vision or urban ambition for Brussels. They both appear to treat the city merely as somewhere to work, sleep, and park your car - with the only difference between them being that one wants a tightly-regulated housing market and the other does not. For the rest, they’re happy to embrace a more or less cynical, unambitious, and uninspired laissez-faire attitude to urbanism.

Where does this aversion to unconventional citizen-led ideas come from? A part of it, I think, is down to the fact that these kinds of initiatives operate by their very nature outside the established patronage networks through which political power has traditionally been exercised in Brussels. Citizen activism offers an alternative, optimistic vision to a party paternalism more comfortable in continuing to offer voters more of the same - “faster horses” - than it is in advocating ambitious change. Better either to coopt them if you can, and if you can’t then undermine or ignore them until they go away.

Others scorn citizen movements for their idealism, arguing that whatever they’re advocating for wouldn’t work for Brussels, and if it did the market would have already stepped in and provided it. It’s not the government’s job to intervene. There are always other, more pressing priorities - things that matter more to our constituents. Sometimes it’s just that institutional inertia is too strong, that whatever’s being advocated or asked for just looks like too much hard work, diverges too far from “the way we’ve always done things”.

And anyway, isn’t the city on the verge of a catastrophic bankruptcy? Yes, the city has run out of money, but it’s never the state subsidies for car ownership or air pollution that are the first expenses to be cut. One of the reasons Flow gave for its closing was that the money needed to keep it going would have to come from the Brussels government, that they couldn’t and shouldn’t take on the burden alone. Only, there isn’t a Brussels government, 318 days after the election. Flow is just the latest victim of this political vacuum. As the money dries up the softer, more frivolous projects are going to disappear first - the festivals and street parties, the bike classes and pop-up bars - as creative Brussels is slowly asphyxiated.

They might not have the electoral importance of hard issues like clean streets and parking spaces but it’s exactly these soft projects, the minor joys like Flow and Bar Eliza, that make a city a worthwhile place to live. That make us willing to put up with all the other nonsense we’re forced to endure on a daily basis. Watch as the wellspring of creative engaged people in Brussels only dying for help make the city better curdles into an angry resignation as Brussels continues to be run by the unambitious, overly cautious, unimaginative, and electorally cynical, and we’re left with a city good only for working, sleeping, and parking your car, but not much else. A Brussels that is not just financially bankrupt, but culturally, socially, and creatively too.

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