Brussels 5: Gentrification and the Canal

By moving there, they change the equation—they add a layer of chic. The neighborhood becomes desirable, improves for everyone, but then...

After our tour of art nouveau Brussels and the Horta House, I wanted to see nature itself, and not the art it inspired. I don’t know what nature means, though. I shouldn’t pretend art isn’t part of it, that humans aren’t. We are the same as worker bees and wasps. The nests we build are just of glass, or brick and metal, not paper and wax. So what if we are destructive and egotistical? That ties us to other animals. Bears that are waist deep in a river and already replete will sometimes eat only the choicest parts of salmon, and leave the rest to rot. Beavers will block streams and uncaringly flood the habitats of other creatures. The difference is mostly scale. If beavers had opposable thumbs and knew how to manipulate coal, the fuckers would burn up the environment in a flash.

What we did was head to the Anderlecht neighborhood because I’d read about a café there on a bank of the canal. The photo showed a foaming beer and a view of the water, which unites the earth, pounds shorelines, falls from the sky. There was some disruption to the tram that weekend and we got dumped in what felt like a suburban wasteland with some high rises, vast expanses of concrete, and shabby shopping centers.  

We had to walk a long way and cross a couple of small highways to get to the canal. It was hot. I remember worrying about the cheese in my backpack that we’d picked up in a Saint Gilles market we’d run across before going to the Horta House. We heard a lot of Portuguese there, and Italian. Paused to buy an arancino, a rice ball which didn’t make it into the pack but was eaten immediately. We bought a knob of fresh mozzarella, too, and some young pecorino which I imagined growing soft under the sun.

There weren’t traffic lights, just places to dash across the roads. Then the canal was there idling through an urban landscape. There was a bike path alongside. We were on a sidewalk above next to a warehouse-lined road. 

There were stickers and graffiti protesting against a high rise project and the gentrification transforming the neighborhood. We went on, and saw the café squeezed between two warehouses, and the gentrifiers enjoying it, blithely sucking down beer at picnic tables, playing a game that involved knocking down pegs.