"We move though the immense metropolitan territory that sprawls all over our planet. An artificial, flourishing and sturdy lichen covers the stone sphere rotating in space"
Archizoom Associati
Brussels, the capital and largest city of Belgium, is the administrative heart of the European Union (EU). The city of Brussels has a population of about 140,000 while the Brussels Capital Region has a little over a million inhabitants and the wider metropolitan area of Brussels some 1,350,000. The area of the City of Brussels is about 33 square kilometres, giving a population density of around 4,300 inhabitants per square kilometre.
Public space in Brussels, as elsewhere in Europe, is a matter of architecture. Traditionally, public space is the ‘in-between’ of architecture, the streets and the squares. In Brussels, however, public space often means buildings.
Throughout its history Brussels has survived major infrastructural difficulties and unfortunate decisions. From the start, the city’s builders were confronted with a patchwork landscape which demanded the ad hoc solutions that became the norm. Even a disastrous fire in the seventeenth century failed to prompt a master plan like those put into effect in other European cities. The result is a jumble of neighbourhoods and atmospheres. In recent years urban planning in Brussels has focussed on a series of gigantic projects in an apparent attempt to fill the voids, schisms and ruptures that separate several universes. Having decided to clean up its main river, the Zenne, Brussels initiated a sequence of ambitious mega-projects like the North South Junction and the Palace of Justice. Since the nineteenth century architecture has been seen as a solution to the many problems of the city. Building projects shed the traditional references to scale and proportion in favour of the elephantine growth of enormous complexes that attempt to bridge the ruptures in the fabric of the city. 
It is precisely these projects that have given public space its new dimension. No longer just the space in between architecture, the shape of Brussels’ public space is determined in the design of a building. Public space has become integrated into, on, through, and by, these complexes, which blur the traditional boundary between the city’s public space and its architectural spaces.
