Brussels North / Ground zero project

GROUND ZERO Deforming the existence

Brussels North 50°51’37’’N, 4°21’42’’E

GROUND ZERO / graʊnd ˈzɪroʊ noun x

The point on the earth’s surface directly above or below an explosion x

A starting point or base for an activity

1.

Exploring Quartier Nord

Not just emptiness, The force of the site is being the gap.

but the sedimentation of previous interventions, gathered in new assemblages for new urbanities.

Nobody is from Brussels North, and yet, everyone is a piece of Brussels North.

Different realities, bound together.

No nostalgia of the lost past, but an investigation of

It is a multi-composed site trying to define what

the contemporary unique qualities and potentials

should or could be

anchored in the site.

in or out.

Making a bridge would deny the nature of the island from being excluded.

The production of culture instead of the consumption of culture.

The urban is the necessary site of

Categorizing public space as

constant conflicts.

the space that is exposed.

The landscape is the infrastructure to support the production of projects.

Reconstructing the city by destroying it.

Functional elements becoming dysfunctional to be appropriated.

A project of all.

A momentum that creates a critical mass.

2.

Reading Quartier Nord

The metropolitan scale

The surrounding scale

The neighborhood scale

The development of the canal provided the instrument for the city of Brussels to become the capital of Belgium.

As a strategic element, the Canal is strongly linked with the industrial expansion of the city. Thanks to its central position on the continent and its accessibility facilities, the young metropole became, over time, the capital of Europe. This double status and its economic development has attracted waves of immigration to the small capital, conferring today the status of second most cosmopolitan city in the world.

The ‘poverty croissant’ of Brussels - developed as a result of the post-deindustrialization crisis from the 1960s - has never been absorbed by social policy measures. Being the most precarious area of the capital, this region host a concentration of immigrant population that has been living there ever since and whose socio-economic emancipation is without prospects.

Contrasting with the flourishing south of Brussels, this precarious zone structures a dual capital where socio-economic contrasts divide the population, generating the stigmatization of certain neighborhoods.

The North Quarter has suffered drastic changes to serve the metropolitan project.

The local scale was never taken into account.

It’s the area where the backsides of three municpalities come together, the area which is bordered by all different kind of law regulations, the area that serves as the transit zone for the wealthy and the poor.

It’s a piece of city which is at its momentum to rethink and re-elaborate what the role and needs of a neighborhood are into the metropolitan scale.

local economy existing cultural centers temporary empty buildings empty buildings empty ground floor sterile public space sterile streets

The area can extract potentials from the past it suffered from. Anchored in the compact center of the expanding capital, this void of hybridity is a call to generate productive space for its whole context.

The void is not solely considered as a spatial and physical factor, but includes social issues and political neglects.

“Here, when they need to solve a problem, we generally displace it.

Without necessity to solve it, you only need to push it back to the other municipality.”

- Director of Soleil du Nord Asbl, Dec. 2017 -

The ambivalence of the region has been built up over time. Throughout its evolution this strategic zone has been attributed innumerable statutes that transformed it into a barren land.

The overlap of scales, the numerous barriers, the different administrations made it into a hybrid piece of land, delimited and divided.

The North District, a land of borders.

In the interstitial space, a residual no man’s land gives room to claim, to manipulate, to pass between the cracks of contradictories rules.

At the moment of creating this giant no man’s land, the power made a mistake: They neglected the proximity between human beings.

By interrogating the multiplicity of the place and its singular relation with the city, we want to look for new complementarities by crossing the existing limits.

A new reading of the North Quarter should generate awareness of the potential present and the possibility to change the local, the surroundings and the metropolitan environment.

The project requires to be adapted to the local life, to fulfill the needs and desires of the surroundings and to complement the urban project at the metropolitan scale.

The project requires to be adapted to the local life, to fulfill the needs and desires of the surroundings and to complement the urban project at the metropolitan scale.

3.

Positioning Quartier Nord

“How can a profession whose education and practise - based on selling projects through visual manipulation and redundant, subjective, apolitical rhetoric maintain a critical stance when the conditions in the real world are completely fueled by politics? Is architecture the ultimate anesthetic?�

Panopticon - Jeremy Bentham

What About the Possibilities of Kynical Architecture? - WAI Think thank

A. Brodsky - Your Prison

The grey city is the city without qualities: it is big but not huge, it is poor but not desperate, it is growing but not booming.

La Société du Spectacle - Guy Debord

Potemkin Villages - Gregor Sailer

4.

Concept Layer of Law (suspension/ emphasis/implementation) Layer of Deformation Layer of Actor Coalitions

Ground Zero on September 13, 2001

GROUND ZERO Layer of Laws The ground zero concept comes with specific tools to enable its ambitions.

existing between the governance and everyday population struggles.

To liberate ourselves from the incoherent administrative barriers that prevent social emancipation and the power to act, a new set of rules will be used by modifying the existing legal framework for this specific area.

Decently playing with the edges of these legislation allow us to have a strong repercussion on the social justice.

The suspension, modification or implementation of rules give the possibility to create a - coherent - zone for experimentation.

Changing the rules also enables all the present actors to create unexpected coalitions.

This zone, which is composed by three backsides of different municipalities, can become an entity where it is possible to develop an alternative and more appropriate city and neighborhood.

There is a clear critique on the current distance

Memorial - Philippe Dujardin, Venice Biennale 2016

“The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception becomes the rule. In the camp, the state of exception, which was a temporary suspension of the rule of law, is now given as the permanent spatial arrangement.”

- G. Agamben

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something build a new model, that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Kowloon Walled City - Greg Girard

- R. Buckminster Fuller

The law shelling applied, allows to understand the flaws of these.

The interstices leave room for slipping and start to live and play in the interstice between legality and illegality.

“Vocal critics theorizing the creative occupation of the urban space as a new form of sociality. (...) An alternative way of understanding urban space against the logic of the capitalist city.�

- Yoos, J., & James, V., in Negotiating the City, 2016

DEFORMING THE GRID Layer of Deformation To change the perspective on the space from all the present stakeholders, the grid - as the element forming the identity or specific characteristics - of the site would be deformed to make room for radical changes in each particular part of the site and provide the inhabitants with a place for their specific needs.

The deformation is simultaneously a proces of destruction and a proccess of creation.

Alastair Bonnet - The Underground Cities of Cappadocia

Destruction is here considered as a tool to trigger the awareness of the potential embedded in the North Quarter.

“Every citizen has had long associations with some parts of his city, and his image is soaked in memories and meanings.�

- Kevin Lynch

Kowloon Walled City Section

Enzo Traverso - Fire and Blood

The desire line

June Rebellion 1832

When Powerlessness Becomes Complex.

The city is a space where the powerless can make history. That is not to say it is the only space, but it is certainly a critical one. Becoming present, visible, to each other can alter the character of powerlessness.

I make a distinction between different types of powerlessness. It is not simply an absolute condition that can be flattened into the absence of power.

Under certain conditions powerlessness can become complex, by which I mean that it contains the possibility of making the political, the civic or history. There is a difference between powerlessness and invisibility/ impotence.

- Does the City Have Speech? Saskia Sassen

“In this informality there is order & form of public planning in negotiation process”.

- Frei Otto, “Occupying & Connecting”, 2003

Sammy Baloji, Echangeur, Municipality of Limete, March 2013

Sammy Baloji, Echangeur, Municipality of Limete, March 2013

“Change is paradoxically both deeply empowering and inherently divisive.�

- Alain De Botton

A square of city not to blend in, but to contrast, oppose and dialogue with the surroundings. A clumsy and deliberate gsture. Not an icon of abstraction celebrating a ‘creative’ part of the city, but an anti-city defining its seperation.

This alternative city, steals all existing activity along its border and makes it subservient to change- redefining the logic withing which it o p e r a t e s .

The only occasion we build solid form is for a monument- a non utilitarian project. For some reason we feel obliged to not cheat and hollow it out.

The alternative city has peration from any It is a - Jonathan Davies, The Situationists

integrity due to its seeconomic maximisation. greek statue.

1.

1.1 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.131 1.2

We are creating a Landscape not a Building.

A landscape does not have boundaries We define lines of seperation physically, but these are designed to be crossed.

All aspects of the city are stolen and reinvented.

We oppose the surroundings through synthesizing with them, and reinventing the logic on which they operate.

A landscape is inhabited by ‘one’ and ‘all’ not divided and doled out in pretty little boxes.

2.

2.1 2.12 2.2

We are creating an architecture of Experience not an architecture of Form.

The building (lower case b) warps around individual experience, a mesh of Derivé’s.

Since form is subserviant to experience all buildings on the strip are susceptible to change, adaptation and destruction.

With the exception of two: NOSUCH PARTY HEADQUARTERS THE SITUATIONIST LABRATORY These are the sources of innovation. The ‘Idea’ and the ‘Experiment’. They are however susceptible to ‘changeable decors’.

They can change, adapt or destroy themselves.

Le Corbusier’s ignoble masses of concrete and Utilitarian frames - tools for order, perfection and ‘community’ are bent around the random lunacy of the Derivé.

His tools turned against him.

2.21 2.211 2.212 2.22 2.23 2.3 2.31

The following maps initial iterations of [1]- The Strip and [2.211] and [2.212] specifically.

We are bored in the city.

There is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces - the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years.

We are bored in the city.

IVAN CHTCHEGLOV 1953

Together what we build will be destroyed. Then we can destroy who we are.

- Jonathan Davies, The Situationists

ACT Layer of Actor Coalitions Other Brussels based organistations already began to understand the ropes of the system and proposed methods in the rigid system we live in today. They gained access to the needed information and used the legal tools in their advantage.

Japanese constellations

It’s about finding, valorizing and strengthening the existing and present actors active in the North Quarter and Brussels and throughout the project opening up the possibilities to create unseen coalitions amongst them.

Time for the inhabitants to engage in the change of their own neighborhood, the call has been launched.

Since many years, the local population has seen their neighborhood change without being able to raise their voices and act in what was happening.

The Blackout NYC

It’s time for the sacrificed population to be

part of the change and to become active actors and develop forgotten interest.

The gesture would make the project look like it’s never finished to stimulate emergent local interventions to continue it and transform it.

Report in Molenbeek, after Brussels’ terrorist attacks, 2017

A call for action.

Reclaiming the streets.

The constant modification of this figure, will regenerate new unclaimed spaces, which will become potential spaces for change, a kind of civic virus effect.

“As often after this kind of situations, the same people were placed in front of the camera’s, things were presented from the same angle, often not the right one.

They stole our voices.”

- Olivier Bonny, activist, Nov. 2017

Reactivation of forgotten or abandoned buildings, terrains and (public) spaces by means of temporary and autonomous socio-cultural centres.

Dialogue, creation, autonomy and action are crucial to us.

VZW Toestand - plek 332

VZW Toestand

Promoting the transitional use of empty buildings in Brussels.

In a participative and supportive approach, Communa breathes life into unused spaces and reinvigorates neighborhoods while lightening the owner of management inconveniences.

Communa - La Lisière

Communa

Their common philosophy is based on several principles: autonomy, self-management, participation and solidarity.

The particularity of the association lies in the involvement and mutual investment of the inhabitants.

1 2 3 Logements - Rue Royale, La Poissonerie

123 Logements

5.

The Project Civic Canopy Garden CitĂŠ Social Park Urban Souk Border Entrances

DESTIGMATIZATION Activating the transitianal zone.

Today, the new incomers in the area have a tough path to follow, ‘le parcours du combattant’. They need to be integrated into the arrival part of the city.

The challenge is to ensure the transitional zone status of the North Quarter while simultaneously promoting it to become a receptacle for the needs of the surroundings and giving the opportunity to evolve without settling for the long term.

“You are kind of lost, you need a clear reference, a landmark, the feeling that you are following a safe track, finally. Maybe you will encounter people in a similar situation, maybe you will be able to help each others.”

THE CIVIC CANOPY

THE CIVIC CANOPY

DESTIGMATIZATION Social isolation.

In the site of the “Garden Cité” the spatial intervention would consist in deconstruction the monotonous green space. Taking off these elements to provoke the reconsideration of the qualitative vegetal area needed.

The destruction process, by erasing the plinth on these non-qualitative zones, would physically reconnect the housing blocks by providing them a network of clustered gardens at the street level. Opening them a reconnection with the surroundings while offering an array of privacy degrees in these archipelagos of flourishing gardens.

GARDEN CITÉ

GARDEN CITÉ

PRODUCING PRODUCTIVITY Self-development.

Sneaking through the urban islets, the Parc de la Senne is a green line of quality but trapped by large walls.

The social park wants to break these brick walls where they separate the park from large abandoned industrial relics.

The opening of the park on these interiors island, empty sheds and other partially functional spaces, will allow to penetrate a public space in places for public formation.

All these abandoned places will be upgraded to become learning spaces of trades whose values and know-how have enabled Brussels to be what it is.

SOCIAL PARK

SOCIAL PARK

PRODUCING PRODUCTIVITY Economic empowerment.

The North Quarter suffers from a high unemployment degree.

Making the neighborhood productive can improve the socio-economic conditions of the inhabitants and enable them to improve the image of their stigmatized neighborhood.

The urban souk will be the fertile land that allows to expand its habitat on the public space by developing in exchange a trade, a garden or an activity shareable with its entourage.

A commerce realm, this long street will become the driving force of a better urban dynamic for populations constrained by the policies that wish to keep a control over their poor productivity.

The citizens’ initiative will be valued in order to develop local strengths and a strong neighborhood identity.

URBAN SOUK

URBAN SOUK

ENTERING EXPANDING Welcome to Ground Zero These carefully defined areas are both the entry and exit points of Ground Zero.

On the one hand it serves as the transition site for entering / leaving the Ground Zero. They are formed with information about the project so the visitor knows where these steps lead him.

On the other hand, these are also the places of future extension of the zone. In that sense, they become the place of experimentation. If in the various areas of the project, the rules of the game change specifically for each site, in the border zone, they are simultaneously suspended.

It serves as the ephemeral experimental sites where new citizen ideas could emerge.

BORDER / ENTRANCES

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GROUND ZERO Deforming the Existence

In the past, the city has sacrificed the inhabitants of Brussels North to serve the metropolitan project. Decade after decade, this strategic enclave became a land divided through countless entities. Nowadays, the North Quarter is an ambiguous place, where governances overlap, where the overload of rules becomes contradictory. A land of borders defining a no man’s land. An incoherent whole making room for interpretation.

Compiled by many vacant constructions and a socio-spatially isolated population, the north district is at the momentum for fundamental changes. Developing the local strengths, playing with the legal frames and revealing the spatial qualities of the area, the Ground Zero project redefines the North Quarter as a zone for experimentation. Acting through a deformation process, the project aims to unfold the elements that currently compose a barrier for inhabitant’s emancipation. A radical approach that has the advantage of offering new perspectives to all actors - at all power levels – by using the project to create coalitions hitherto unexpected to offer the North Quarter his retribution.

SML(XL) Lerchs Lucas Marchand Shauni Tomulescu Mara KU Leuven- MAHS / MAUSP Studio Concepts & Analysis North Side Stories, Brussels