piétonnier Bruxelles

Cet édito introduit le Portfolio#2 « Zoom in | Zoom out on the Brussels Metropolitan City Center ». Le document complet est téléchargeable à partir du lien suivant : Portfolio#2:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bvajc2bx5wj8h74/20180621_P%232_FINAL.pdf?dl=0

Vous pouvez également consulter la feuille de route de l’année dernière à partir du lien suivant :  les 4 défis, 10 actions et 40 recommandations concrètes:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7xz6468hrr5llaw/BSIBCO_TableauRecapitulatif.pdf?dl=0

As we write this editorial (April 2018), anyone living, working, shopping, going out and residing in Brussels city centre could experience, over the last 2 years and 9 months, the car-free boulevard Anspach. Since June 2015, it also became clearer what can and should be improved or solved, but also what possibilities this 58 200 m² space can offer to Brussels’ city life now that it is no longer the main traffic artery crossing the city centre.

Just by its scale, the pedestrian zone became a powerful but still latent lever to make the city centre the main driving force in a paradigm shift to a more socio-cultural, ecological and economically sustainable capital of Europe. If this large pedestrian zone in a densely used and inhabited city centre were developed as a broadly supported urban project, which means that the project would bewell-designed, strongly embedded in existing plans and appropriated by its residents, then this project can provide all the conditions for being a  driver to change the city centre of Brussels into the city centre of the metropolitan region. Necessarily, such a choice requires a to choose for an urban imaginary - a certain vision of the “ideal city” – that drastically abandons the ideal of the car city [Genard et al., 2016; Vanhellemont, 2016]. 

The ways in which the the urban imagery of a liveable, cosmopolitan and sustainable city can be realised, is one of the points of reflection at the heart of the BSI-BCO. Rather than asking how the pedestrian zone can contribute to the Brussels metropolitan area, we think that it is more interesting to question the way a metropolitan city like Brussels can anchor itself and make itself understood and shown in the Pedestrian Zone and the city centre of Brussels, by programming different types of public spaces, activities, events, businesses and identities along the values it wants to show. In this way, the question becomes: Can Brussels, as a cosmopolitan city at the heart of Europe, fulfil a pioneering role in this paradigm shift ?

Le piétonnier a suscité de multiples prises de position et controverses. Celles-ci ont été l’occasion pour ceux qui y ont pris part d’argumenter non seulement sur le piétonnier mais, plus largement, sur les conceptions de la ville, de Bruxelles ou de l’espace public qu’ils défendaient. Elles engageaient des imaginaires urbains, des visions de ce que chacun entendait souhaiter pour Bruxelles, ses espaces publics, sa mobilité, ses inégalités, son économie… Cette
contribution analyse ces imaginaires qui se découvrent au fil de la lecture des controverses : ville appropriée par ses
citoyens, durable, ouverte, sécuritaire, cosmopolite, équitable, économique, attractive, participative, réflexive, bien
gouvernée… L’article conclut par la mise en évidence des trois conceptions de l’espace public sous-jacentes aux
imaginaires à l’œuvre, par ailleurs souvent enchevêtrées dans les argumentations : espace public économique,
espace public politique et espace public culturel. Dans les agencements que le futur du piétonnier opérera entre eux,
se situe sans doute l’enjeu central de son avenir.