A “something different” place in Antwerp, Belgium

Antwerp, a city in the north of Belgium, can be seen as different rings of development around the historical city center. The history and development of Antwerp starts at the river Schelde, which ends in the North Sea. It was always considered strategically important, starting in the Roman times. Antwerp developed as the most important harbor in Western Europe until the end of the 16th century when the Spanish took over the city. During the late Middle Ages, Antwerp became one of the richest and most urbanised parts of Europe, weaving the wool of neighbouring lands into cloth for both domestic use and export. In the 15th century it also became the centre centre of the world’s diamond trade due to innovations by a Flemish jeweller in this industry. In the city center, the part between the walls until the 18th century, a very sophisticated culture developed. Today it is mostly a place for shopping, fashion, tourism, and living space for richer people.

Before the 19th century it was not allowed to build outside the walls. A new wave of urbanisation, a belt of 19th century houses, was formed and due to policies at the beginning of the 20th century Flemish people were encouraged to live outside the city’s center. Governments did not want to have too many people in the cities because people could riot and cause chaos. Since then there is a big wave of suburbanisation in the green belt around the 19th century belt where most of the middle and upper classs live in the greener suburbs or even rural areas.  Residents of these suburban communities commute every day to Antwerp or to Brussels.

There was a big migration boom after World War II because the Belgian government signed guest worker agreements with a variety of countries, including Italy (1946), Spain (1956), Greece (1957), Morocco and Turkey (1964), Tunisia (1969), and Algeria and Yugoslavia (1970). These guest workers, and later their families, moved into these cheap empty 19th century buildings and this belt was a blind spot on the map of social infrastructure in Antwerp. Until recently the city did not make any investments and there were no facilities like child care. It was a nobody’s land. Ghettos formed and there have been riots and tensions.  This tension feeds fear of foreigners, which is a good playground for right wing parties that have dominated the government in Antwerp since the 1990s.

The Railway station district, which is located in this urban belt, was also in the 17th century an “empty” space next to the “Spaanse Vesten”, the city walls. There was even no agriculture, but there were many temporary activities, like events or trade. It had always a status of “something different”, because it was not inside the city. Between 1895 and 1905 the train station, often called a railway station cathedral, was built. It is not only an important place of development and mobility, but is also an architectural pearl which attracts many tourists. It is on the border between the poor “19th century belt” and the rich city center. The railway station district became a “hetero topie”, a place for the other, but also an “allo topie”, a place where more global cultures got mixed together. It is a center of nightlife, but you find there also tourists and commuters passing by, mothers who bring their kids to school, the Orthodox Jewish diamond center which is now getting taken over by Indians, the “smallest Chinatown”hand a hub for African diaspora, among other immigrant groups coming to make their way in a new place. The district is now a mix of different cultures and functions, a place for something different, like it was already in the 17th century. A lot of gentrification is happening there, such as the central library, the railway station, and a glamorous boulevard for tourists, and as a result, pushing poor people deeper in the already deteriorating 19th century belt.

According to a research in 2006; the Moroccan population in Antwerp (one of the biggest minorities in Antwerp) would like to integrate. That means that they would like to preserve their own culture, but that they think that contact with the autochtone population is very important. They don’t want to become like the locals (assimilation), but also don’t want to form an island (separation) and don’t want to belong to both groups (marginalisation). Since the nineties of the previous century, the government of Antwerp is right-winged, who try to get through an assimilation, rather than an integration policy.

It is no wonder that in these ghettos in this belt in Antwerp, and Brussels (where you have similar urban developments), the Islamic State can find frustrated young men to do terrible things such as the Paris attacks on the 13th of November. The right wing policy makers are not really tackling the roots of the problems. In contrast, instead of promoting diversity programs that assimilate immigrant groups, the government spends money to militarize the city and create more fear and anxiety towards the “other”.

On my website you can read more about and get more a sense of Antwerp: https://wendywuytsblog.wordpress.com