Across the Atlantic, “urban” blogs are flourishing. An army of experts, journalists, urban planners, economists, ecologists, city-enthusiasts keep nourishing this ever going debate: what is the perfect city? How is it shaped? How does it work? What is the future of cities? On the old continent, urban blogging is not that lively. Projects emerge and collapse. 23 national languages in the UE describe the situation in countless cities in 27 countries, without looking at the big picture. Or they look at it from a narrow angle: housing, energy, transport, urban regeneration. Without travelling extensively, we’re most of the time unaware that the problem we’re facing in “our” major city has been successfully tackled years ago in a similar context in another EU member state. What we think is an amazing innovation (like Parisians inventing beaches and bikes) exists for a long time. What we think is unachievable has been achieved elsewhere.
I come from the countryside, so I'm not exactly a city boy. Well, where I come from (a thriving 9000 inhabitants megalopolis); we call it “la ville” and would be amazed to see outsiders calling it a village. Nevertheless I have been fortunate enough, at my still young age, to experience living in a few major and very different cities: Rennes, Lille, Bordeaux, Istanbul, Budapest, to end up in Brussels, and to visit dozen of them across the world, as a tourist or “out on business”: from the sprawl of Dakar to the narrow streets of old Tbilissi, from the dust of Lomé to the large soviet avenues and endless slums of Ulan Baatar, from the austro-hungarian plan of Oradea, Belgrade or Novi Sad to the Ottoman architecture of Safranbolu and Amasya. This, amazingly, got me thinking.
The way a people think and sees the world is reflected in the way is cities are build. This could say a lot about Brussels, the city proud enough to have given birth to an official urbanization concept in itself: Brusselization, or “anarchic commercial property development in a historic city”.
This blog will be written by a dilettante non English speaker, untrained in architecture, urbanism or the environment. I nevertheless work daily with urban planners, surveyors, experts in energy saving, housing, transportation, and am addicted to the innovations making our cities better places to live. Needless to say, I support density, green roofs, green transport, walkabilty, and am (logically) an anti-car ayatollah.
I’ll be trying to bring you news from the world of cities, present what seem to be the “do’s and don’t” in terms of modern urban policies, try not too rant to often about all the “don’t, oh God, please don’t” implemented over the last decades in the city I live in, and, since it is a Brussels blog, discuss the way the Urban Strategy of the EU is being shaped and how it can influence the future of our cities.
