The North district, demolition for speculation

Built around the route of the chaussée d’Anvers and bordered by the old port facilities of Brussels as well as by the first Gare du Nord, the Quartier Nord was originally a prosperous neighborhood endowed with a rich and varied industrial and commercial heritage. The works of the Jonction Nord-Midi in the 1930s marked a first amputation of the neighborhood, isolating it from the lower parts of Saint-Josse and Schaerbeek. In the 1950s, the construction of the viaduct on the boulevard d’Anvers finished isolating it and caused the desertion of its inhabitants. The disaster of the Quartier Nord then served as a pretext for public authorities to definitively raze the historical buildings and chase away the inhabitants in order to build a "modern" business district there, around the second Gare du Nord. Today, the towers of the "Manhattan" business center are aging, the question of their heavy renovation is bringing back the tensions that run through the neighborhood. Despite the stinging failure of this model of "vertical city", private developers, with the approval of public authorities, persist in planning new towers. The ARAU offers you an original route putting the urbanistic history of this neighborhood back into perspective in order to better understand the issues at stake.