As a lover of the city, I find VUB’s urban sociologist Eric Corijn’s thesis interesting. His main claim is this: cities and nation states are fundamentally divergent. Nation states are based on purity and homogeneity: one language, one history, one volk. Cities are based on diversity and metissage, with physical proximity pushing all these different people to interact, which results in some sort of coherence.
With Brussels there is an extra problem: the city is governed by a region, itself built on a communitarian architecture that reflects poorly the diversity of the city (80% of households are multilingual!). So, as the new government sets out to “redorer l’image de Bruxelles”, will it be able to do justice to its glorious messiness?
Leaving it here.