"De sociaal-ruimtelijke structuur van Brussel lijkt op verschillende manieren op die van een Noord-Amerikaanse stad. Net als in de Verenigde Staten leeft het armste deel van de bevolking geconcentreerd in de binnenstad, terwijl de midden- en hogere inkomensklassen de periferie verkiezen. Sinds het einde van de jaren vijftig heeft België een massale suburbanisatie van de middenklasse gekend, waarbij een constante instroom van gastarbeiders ervoor zorgde dat de vrijgekomen plaatsen in de centrale wijken werden ingevuld. De intensieve tertiarisering van de Brusselse economie sinds de jaren zestig tengevolge van internationale politieke functies heeft de verloedering van de binnenstad en de vlucht van de middenklasse verder in de hand gewerkt."[1]
"Relinquished to the working class, abandoned to the poor and unemployed amid postwar suburban expansion, reconfigured as reservations for racial and ethnic minorities, the terrain of the inner city is suddenly valuable again, perversely profitable. Gentrification represents a geographical, economic, and cultural reversal of postwar urban decline and abandonment. [....] Gentrification is widely scripted in the media as a struggle to conquer and civilize the urban frontier. As the real-estate industry pushes new development and rehabilitation into existing neighborhoods, threatened areas mount a militant defense of home and community."[2]
"Roland Barthes once proposed that "myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things." Richard Slotkin elaborates that in addition to wrenching meaning from its temporal context, myth has a reciprocal effect on history: "history becomes a cliché." We might add the corollary that meaning must also be made transportable over space: the loss of the geographical quality of things is equally central to the making of myth. The greater the separation of events from their constitutive geography, the more powerful the mythology and the more clichéd the geographical landscapes expressing and expressed through the mythology."[3]
"The social meaning of gentrification is increasingly constructed through the vocabulary of the frontier myth. This appropriation of language and landscape - the new city as new frontier - seems at first playfully innocent, and in any case so common as to be wholly unremarkable. Newspapers habitually extol the courage of urban homesteaders, the adventurous spirit and rugged individualism of the new settlers, brave pioneers, presumably going where no (white) man has ever gone before."[4]
Foto's genomen in Molenbeek (Brussel), aan de Henegouwenkaai, oktober 2024.
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