Quartier Nord — community under
gentrification
Picture Parc Gaucheret: a bumpy green park engulfed between high-rises, one of a kind in Brussels. It’s not a common sight for most inhabitants walking cobblestone streets in Ixelles or living in brick houses in Woluwe. Some may have their office in one of the district’s skyscrapers, before leaving to return home for the day. But parks like these are (also) the reality of Quartier Nord, a very diverse community, where you see people of every ethnicity, religion, age, etc living and interacting in the area between Gare du Nord and the canal, overlapping parts of Brussels City, Schaerbeek and Saint-Josse-ten-Noode.
My first time in Gare du Nord was almost ten years ago. Back in September 2016, I arrived in Brussels as a 21-year-old Portuguese Erasmus student at ULB, my first time living abroad. I remember vividly every step of this process: the month before, at my grandparents’ lake house in central Portugal, I read about a bus trip being organized to Oktoberfest in Munich. One of those you only think is a good idea when you’re a student: 12h traveling to Munich, 12h at the venue, 12h for the return trip. And this is how I first got in touch with the busiest train station in Belgium.
It probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise that it wasn’t love at first sight. Not that I hated it — to be honest, I just didn’t find it remarkable — but by then, and while most of my life happened south of La Chasse, it felt like it does to most of my friends nowadays: far away (even though it’s just two tram stops from De Brouckère, meaning, way closer than any part of Ixelles).
Return to Brussels
Life happened meanwhile, and after going back to Portugal, leaving for the Netherlands for two years, studying in Poland for a year, and briefly returning to the homeland, I moved to Brussels for good in March 2022, starting my current contract at the European Commission in August of the same year. The following month, after visiting just the second apartment in my house hunt, I trusted my gut and signed a purchase agreement for a 2-bedroom close to Parc Gaucheret. Visiting this apartment was my second conscious visit to the North Station after that one in 2016. I wasn’t, once again, very impressed, and still had in my mind that it was “far”. But it was a nice flat and a good price, so I went for it and spent the coming months thinking if it was such a good idea to commit to a 25-year loan.
I don’t really have work colleagues that I know are living in my district. In fact, due to my skin tone and facial features, sporty clothes, and practicing in-person what I learn in Arabic Darija classes, I believe I’m often regarded as a second-generation Moroccan learning his mother tongue. And maybe not being visibly perceived as a (often prejudiced) white-collar worker is precisely what brings me closer to my neighbours. Perhaps it helps corroborate my thesis, based on the experience of having already lived in four countries and visited ten times more, that often a so-called dangerous area is simply either a place 1) with visible poverty and precarity, which is predicted to increase as the current government cuts the welfare state, or 2) where people have darker skin than the interlocutor. Or, because these are unfortunately often correlated, both.
This being said, I also had my doubts when moving to the Quartier Nord. But I started to pay attention to how this conversation was happening. Most people who told me they heard about problems in this neighbourhood did only that: heard about them. My second question is always “but have you visited it yourself?” and very few had, other than catching a train. Now, I know that hearing that an area of a city has a bad reputation is a legitimate reason not to want to visit it. The problem is that it can lead us to rush into conclusions without knowing the history of the places. While it’s difficult to find Quartier Nord-specific statistics, the overall picture for the Northern Brussels police area (POLBRUNO) reports 9,762 as the total number of criminal offenses in the first semester of 2025, 3,262 of those consisting of theft and extortion. Across all six Brussels police regions, this makes POLBRUNO tied with Western Brussels in mid-ranking for unsafe areas for predatory/interpersonal street crime. It is also true that, on the other hand, Safe Brussels reported that a higher incidence of drug trafficking, as well as possession, carrying, and illegal transport of weapons, has been found to occur in this district in 2024.
Stats don’t tell you everything
I believe this highlights how nuanced the picture is. It’s hard to argue that it has rising homelessness (it is increasing at a staggering rate of 25% per year in the Brussels region) and trash on the floor, but frankly speaking, so does most of the rest of the city. On the side of the Quartier Nord, I have walked many times and felt safe, and so have my former female housemates except on very rare occasions (as they told me, not more unsafe than in other districts). I do not, unfortunately, vouch for the other side of the train tracks in Rue d’Aerschot — even if I often go to Rue de Brabant during daylight and it is simply a very lively commercial street. But I do for “my” side, where I have access to almost every service I need: from bpost to (multiple) pharmacies to medical centres, as well as restaurants — shootout to Chez Diallo, the best West African place in town, to small supermarkets.
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There is also Tour & Taxis after a 10-minute walk, where I go for sports (running and padel), exhibitions, restaurants, and groceries. In between these places, it’s possible to pass by what I consider the most beautiful canal area of Brussels. I know the standard is very low for a city that, unlike most European capitals, did an awful job by burying its river decades ago. But the renovated (also gentrified) canal area close to the Suzan Daniel bridge offers diverse brunch places, basketball and football courts, a skate park, a nice promenade along the water and the brand-new contemporary art museum KANAL-Centre Pompidou that will open its doors in late November.
I live for the first time in a building with its own Wikipedia page: a 28-floor high-rise, the 4th highest residential building in Brussels and 29th overall. Résidence Nord was inaugurated precisely 50 years ago as one of the first of the Plan Manhattan, a massive gentrification process that displaced over 12,000 residents (many of them Southern European and African migrants) aiming to build 78 new office towers to turn the area into a new business and financial district. The Manhattan Plan was and is the pinnacle of what urban planners call “Brusselisation”: the rushed, dissonant real-estate practices that shaped the city post-WW2. Inspired by the cultural hegemonic relevance of the United States, the idea of reshaping a working-class neighbourhood into a supposed “modern” district, with a completely foreign architectural style, defaced the Quartier Nord and disenfranchised many of its former residents.
Meanwhile, the people did what they do best and resisted — after all, we’re talking about living around 5–10 min away on foot from the Simon Bolívar square, named after the Venezuelan revolutionary. Many committees were created to reverse the situation, featuring architects, philosophers, social assistants, among others. They have produced reports, questioning the supposed supremacy of “public utility” over the right to housing in a context where public power appears to benefit capital over the democratic will of the residents. A tenants’ union was created in 1983, fourteen years after the first evictions of around 1350 people over empty promises of new social housing.
Due to an economic crisis in the late 70s and 80s, only four of them were built until the project restarted in 1987. Nowadays, companies like Proximus have offices in the area, as well as most of the European Union executive agencies, with whom I play volleyball weekly. Going to Locomotive, the youth centre where I volunteer every Tuesday after work, I also pass by the Parc de la Senne, a 10-year-old small urban park which tells the story of the gentrification.
The community fights back
A new project called “Place Noord” came to life last year, aiming to turn the former Centre de Communication Nord building (the one with big letters reading CCN that was taken down between 2023 and 2024) into a guinguette and seating area, with music and drinks turning it into an alternative urban rooftop before it will turn into four new tours (whenever the new Brussels government decides so). Up4North, the non-profit organisation behind it, wants to bring community life back to this area and de-gentrify a district where many offices are now empty and are planned to become 2,000 new flats within the next ten years. Inactive during winter, Place Noord (under the campaign name BXN, short for Bruxelles Nord) reopened last April 24 and will host musical events throughout the summer.
The promoters of Place Noord don’t hide from addressing the potential criticism of benefiting from gentrification. And neither should I, or any other earner above-average that moves to the area. And I believe it’s not solely a matter of principle, but also very pragmatic: gentrification benefits very few locals, including those who move in as it happens. While it may sound tempting on paper, I don’t think we can ever be fully happy in places with a lack of community spirit, few green spaces, and the same stores and overpriced cafés as everywhere else. These processes are almost always for the benefit of corporations and construction companies, which either spend only their working hours in the area or never set foot at all.
This doesn’t mean we cannot enjoy an open-air music event, or a nice run alongside the canal. But our role cannot end here. We can engage politically by voting in communal elections, participating in condominium meetings, engaging in online public consultations about the future of the area — such as the one about the four new towers planned to be built, open until June 2. And political involvement also happens daily: besides volunteering at Locomotive and helping disenfranchised kids with their homework, I also spend one hour per week talking to a senior member of my community to combat loneliness and social exclusion. For all these reasons, I feel at home because I’m in touch with the real diversity that this city has to offer.
Pedro Mendes
