Christian Kesteloot

Segregation and Economic integration of Immigrants in Brussels

During the 1960s and early 1970s, suburbanization was the most important process shaping Brussels’ socio-spatial structure. Fordist accumulation was based on the distribution of productivity gains over profit and wage increases. As such, growing mass production found a market in growing mass consumption. Houses, cars and consumer durables fuelled this growth. These goods required space and became visible because people bought or built houses on the urban fringe, commuted daily by car and accumulated consumer durables at home. Thus, suburbanization in Belgium was the spatial expression of Fordist economic growth. The changing class structure also supported the suburbanization process. Rising levels of education and the development of tertiary activities pushed the Belgian population into upward social mobility. The population of Brussels became increasingly middle class and could draw on its growing incomes to become the owner-occupiers of individual buildings of dwellings outside the city, in a green environment where land prices were affordable.

Unequal Economic Development at the Origin of the Federalization Process

Unequal economic development in Belgium is often reduced to a mere change in the economic fortunes of Flanders and Wallonia. This image is then used to explain the federalization process. A closer look at the economic development of Flanders and Wallonia, in its relation to the geography of demographic changes, yields a more complex process consisting of three stages. Nevertheless, this very process created different political hegemonies north and south of the linguistic frontier. This explains why unequal economic development was perceived in terms of Flanders and Wallonia and why this perception was politically effective. The present chapter gives a description of this unequal development and points to the geographical basis of the two political hegemonies.

Brussels: Neighbourhoods as Generators of Integration

When the geographical and historical context is taken into account, spatial concentration of poverty in Belgium can be expected in three situations: working class areas in the nineteenth-century inner city belts, in industrial regions, and recent social housing estates. The second one is not relevant in the Brussels context.