IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cog/urbpla/v5y2020i2p249-261.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Recording Permanence and Ephemerality in the North Quarter of Brussels: Drawing at the Intersection of Time, Space, and People

Author

Listed:
  • Claire Bosmans

    (Department of Architecture, KU Leuven, Belgium)

  • Racha Daher

    (Department of Architecture, KU Leuven, Belgium)

  • Viviana d’Auria

    (Department of Architecture, KU Leuven, Belgium)

Abstract

Lying in the Senne River Valley, the North Quarter of Brussels is a physical record of spatial transformations unevenly distributed over time. Waves of developments and unfinished plans colonized its original landscape structure, erasing, writing, and re-writing it with large-scale metropolitan projects and transportation systems, around which an industrial and urban fabric developed. Accumulated expansions left an assemblage of incomplete infrastructures in which a multi-faceted and highly identifiable quarter lies punctuated by weakly defined morphological mismatches. At the center of this diverse and mutilated fabric, Maximilien Park stands as pars pro toto. From a combination of research methods that includes ethnographic fieldwork and interpretative mapping, three drawings are overlaid with the moving dimensions of space, time, and people, and assembled in a reinterpreted triptych to investigate the production of that public space. The first panel “Traces” overlaps lost urban logics and remaining traces on the urban tissue. The second panel “Cycles” traces the uneven deconstruction of the North Quarter during the last century, identifying scars of its past. The third panel “Resignifications” focuses on recent events in the area, examining how people have appropriated and transformed the park since 2015. With this triptych, the article aims to re-interpret the palimpsest of the North Quarter, represent the area’s transforming character, and unravel a spatial reading of the lived experiences of the place through time.

Suggested Citation

  • Claire Bosmans & Racha Daher & Viviana d’Auria, 2020. "Recording Permanence and Ephemerality in the North Quarter of Brussels: Drawing at the Intersection of Time, Space, and People," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 5(2), pages 249-261.
  • Handle: RePEc:cog:urbpla:v5:y:2020:i:2:p:249-261
    DOI: 10.17645/up.v5i2.2753
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/2753
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.17645/up.v5i2.2753?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cog:urbpla:v5:y:2020:i:2:p:249-261. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: António Vieira or IT Department (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cogitatiopress.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.