Lecture: The Return to the Centre - Brussels and the Recovery of the Inner City

For half a century, value migrated out of European city centres while the inner city was left to hollow out. Brussels lived that story more visibly than most, and it is now reversing it. Marnix Galle will trace that reversal through the work he has led since 2001 — first at Allfin, the developer he founded, and since 2016 at Immobel, a listed Belgian real estate developer — taking obsolete twentieth-century stock in central Brussels, office towers built for a way of working that has gone and blocks that had fallen out of use, and returning it to the city as places where people live, work and gather. Oxy, Lebeau and Brouck'R are recent evidence. The lecture looks at what made those projects possible: the capital, the permits, the politics and the design decisions, and the energy — in both directions — that drives changes of this scale or impedes them. Each of the three came close to failing before it prevailed. New Orleans faces its own version of the same question, and the lecture is offered in that spirit. 

This lecture is supported by A Mary W. and Arthur Q. Davis.