The Brussels Edge

Abstract

The Brussels metropolitan area is characterised by a strong mismatch between functional interdependence and institutional fragmentation. While mobility flows, housing dynamics, employment patterns and social relations increasingly operate across the boundary between the Brussels-Capital Region (BCR) and its surrounding Flemish periphery, planning competences, governance structures and territorial identities remain largely organised according to administrative borders. This produces spatial discontinuities, uneven accessibility and limited coordination in a territory that already functions as a shared metropolitan system.

This graduation project investigates how spatial design and institutional strategies can mediate the integration of the Flemish periphery into the Brussels metropolitan system. Rather than treating integration as a purely physical or infrastructural challenge, the research approaches it as a multidimensional process involving spatial systems, social dynamics and institutional frameworks. The Flemish periphery is therefore not understood as a homogeneous suburban belt, but rather as a collection of differentiated interplaces, where municipalities such as Vilvoorde, Tervuren and Sint-Genesius-Rode each relate differently to Brussels through mobility, landscape, identity and governance.

Methodologically, the project combines spatial analysis, governance research, pattern-based thinking and Research-by-Design. The pattern language translates the analytical findings into a flexible set of intervention principles organised around connectivity, centrality, borders and cooperation. These patterns structure both the institutional and spatial proposals, allowing regional strategies and local interventions to be understood as part of the same metropolitan process.

The project proposes a shift from fragmented planning towards a more relational and cooperative metropolitan approach. At the institutional scale, this is explored through soft governance mechanisms, project-based partnerships and funding incentives that can support collaboration without requiring a new metropolitan authority. At the spatial scale, the design strategies test how mobility corridors, peripheral centralities, productive landscapes, border zones and social infrastructures can become mediating interfaces between Brussels and its Flemish periphery, with Vilvoorde serving as the main case for local design exploration.

By linking spatial design with soft institutional strategies, the thesis reframes the Brussels edge not as a marginal buffer zone or a fixed line of separation, but as an active metropolitan interface. The project argues that integration should not imply the absorption of the periphery into Brussels, but rather the construction of stronger relationships between differentiated municipalities, communities, infrastructures and institutions.