On a cold december morning, a hundred or so gilets jaunes had gathered in the vicinity of rue de la Loi in Brussels.footnote1 Blocked by the police, they were chanting ‘All together, all together, all . . .’, as they struggled in vain to move towards the Robert Schuman Roundabout. The goal was to get inside the Berlaymont building, the cruciform office block that houses the European Commission. No luck. The Belgian cavalry, in the shape of mounted police, was already on its way. Nevertheless, everyone understood the need to target ‘Europe’ before booing national governments. That’s what issues the instructions to keep us in our place. Unshakable, invincible, ‘as cold as an eu directive on insurance policies’,footnote2 the Berlaymont sits at the heart of what’s known as the city’s European Quarter. It faces the newly rebuilt home of the European Council and Council of Ministers, a giant mish-mash of steel, glass and art-deco façade known as the Europa building, on the other side of the rue de la Loi. (The sprawling new nato hq occupies a former airfield, 5 kilometres to their north.)
The Robert Schuman Roundabout was not chosen by chance. A gateway to the city, straddling the rue de la Loi, which in turn links the avenue de la Joyeuse Entrée to the rue Royale, it has long attracted popular mobilizations. It was repainted by Greenpeace only recently, transformed into a giant sun: ‘Go Solar!’ That touch of gaiety couldn’t conceal the infinite sadness of the rue de la Loi. Slicing through the district, noisy, hostile, exhausting, walled off by blind buildings raised in an uninterrupted belt, it presents its four lanes and 40,000 cars a day to scared pedestrians. The European Quarter itself, with its checkerboard grid of streets, seems like a gigantic building game that consists of piling up glass and concrete cubes. Every day, 27,000 eu functionaries hurry through. The district, bounded by parks, is still known to local citizens as the wealthy Leopold Quarter; its mansions once sheltered huge colonial fortunes from the Congo’s mines. The eighty-five office blocks in which eu policy is manufactured—along with thousands of prescriptions, norms, regulations and technical constraints—are built upon their rubble.
Yet there is always something new to be demolished in the European Quarter, since, as Ludovic Lamant notes in his engaging critique of ‘building-site Brussels’, the newly constructed offices are almost identical to the ones that have just been torn down.footnote3 Demolitions cleared the ground for yet more offices; new motorways and access roads were driven through the neighbouring districts, to the anger of the locals. Brussels wasn’t chosen at the outset to be the administrative headquarters of the eu. Although Jean Monnet’s memoirs speak of the dream of uniting all the European institutions in a single urban space, in architectural terms, Brasilia might be a better example of what he had in mind. It was only little by little that the Belgian capital assumed this gloomy status. Most Brussels residents are allergic to the European Quarter, which they seldom visit.