The Big Conversation - urban session about Brussels

On Saturday, 31 January, we participated in the event “The Big Conversation”, organized by the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies. It was an engaging and thought-provoking event in which multiple urban practitioners, activists, and participants took part in direct conversation sessions across different discussion groups.

Our group was assigned a particularly challenging topic: contemporary gentrification and the intimate relationship between public authorities and private developers. Within a limited timeframe of 45 minutes, our task was to expose and discuss the main characteristics of this complex issue.

Given the difficulty—and at times overwhelming nature—of the topic, we decided to introduce a small interactive game. Participants were divided into several groups and asked to select pairs of illustrations and connect them to specific keywords. Each group then had to explain the critical moment that justified the connection between the chosen illustration and keyword. To deepen the discussion, groups negotiated among themselves to claim the keywords they felt most accurately captured the meaning of their illustrations.

Through this dynamic exchange, we were able to identify several key aspects that define gentrification and its relationship to neoliberalism. More importantly, we hope we succeeded in conveying—through an immersive approach—how gentrification is gradually coded by different actors in a spontaneous and ambiguous manner, making it difficult to detect unless one is consciously aware of its mechanisms.

We absolutely enjoyed it!