Beauty is in the eye of the "bee-holder"

A post by Lucas Lyko & Charlotte Tiberghien

Imagine this: you’re a real estate developer currently searching for a nice plot to build your beautiful new architectural masterpiece. A shopping centre perhaps? Or how about a flagship 10-storey office block? There’s two very different plots that you’ve got your eyes set on: buying up a section of the Parc Cinquantenaire (lovely, very posh indeed) or going for the Josaphat Friche (an old wasteland with some grass, can only be an improvement - right!?). 

Why are we giving you such a ridiculous decision to ponder over? In the case of Parc Cinquantenaire, it’s probably obvious how unlikely it might be to get your stunning project constructed in one of Brussels’ most iconic green spaces, perfectly pruned and organised (albeit with a road running through the middle) to mark the anniversary of the Belgian state. You’re less likely to ruffle the feathers of anyone in an old brownfield site grown over with a load of weeds…right? Who is realistically going to rise up to defend some random wasteland?

A lot of this comes to how we read urban green spaces. Putting important things like air pollution control and biodiversity aside, it is often the visual aspect of the park (or wasteland!) that we take away the most from. We can be quick to equate an elegantly arranged park with a high quality of ‘greening’ and an unmaintained brownfield site as needing more care, investment or even taming - perhaps with our cutting-edge luxury housing development? 

The problem is that in our rush to judge the beauty of a green space we’re likely to miss the multiple benefits that it may bring and how different people may see this differently. Greening the city, or keeping the city green, may well be about making it prettier to look at and spend time in, but this is just one angle. What about how useful a row of shrubs is to make living next to a road just that bit quieter for residents? Have you ever thought about the animals that might be hiding in someone’s unmowed garden? Urban green spaces come in many forms and provide many different services, be that biodiversity, air pollution absorption, flood prevention or a nice place for a picnic. Perhaps, though, very few (if any at all) are capable of providing all of those. That’s where we need to think twice about which green spaces are ‘valuable’ and if any should truly be disregarded as ‘wastelands’.

Let’s go back to “La Friche Josaphat” (the ‘Josaphat wasteland’) that we mentioned above: a 24ha space near the heart of Brussels that throughout the 20th century was used as a railway depot. After its abandonment in the early 2000s, it was bought by the region which did little beyond dismantling the railway infrastructure and turning it into a semi-natural grassland by 2013. Over time, the Friche came to host a growing number of plant and animal species, including the occasional family of rabbits you might encounter on your morning jogging routine. As one of the last large unoccupied wasteland areas of the region, the Josaphat Friche plays a crucial role in providing ecosystem services, not least significant biodiversity because of its size and lack of human intervention. Various animal species have found shelter there by escaping both urban development encroachment but also heavy-handed agricultural practices that can undermine their habitats. It is also the richest semi-natural space in terms of wild bees at the regional level. Pretty nice, huh? 

The friche has been recently threatened by the region’s ambition to create a new mixed-use quarter, initially met by protest from various citizen groups and associations. Despite these alarm bells, the Société d’Aménagement Urbain, Brussel’s territorial development coordinator, is determined to stick with the project - after all, why not fill an ‘empty’ space with 509 houses (of which, for once, a good chunk of social housing is included), a school and private gardens? Nice little ponds and the odd well-located bench are surely better than a load of random grass? What this forgets is that what we may be quick to judge as ‘beauty’ is not the same as biodiversity, richness or ecosystem services. Leaving the current plant and animal inhabitants to squeeze into a smaller patch of friche in the North undermines the overall function of the ecosystem - this is another thing we often forget. Whatever the case may be, the latest version of the project was presented this month and the suspense is high to see what has changed, or not… 

So, what are we trying to get at here? Perhaps that you should lose all your inhibitions and get in that application to build the retail complex of your dreams behind the great Cinquantenaire arch? After all, if it is less valuable for biodiversity, who cares if some of it disappears. Perhaps that’s not quite it: even if urban greening is complicated, it’s not all relative. Rather, we should be open to the idea that different green spaces offer us (and the natural systems we are inseparable from) different benefits. We should, then, be very cautious of someone identifying valueless wastelands in our cities. Instead, it is worth asking what (unexpected) benefits the system offers and how do local people think about this? Beauty, after all, is in the eye of the beholder, be that a bumblebee pollinating the friche or a local resident walking through a meadow each day rather than your next architectural experiment! 

For the curious and motivated minds out there: 

• Beninde, J., Veith, M., & Hochkirch, A. (2015). Biodiversity in cities needs space: a meta‐analysis of factors determining intra‐urban biodiversity variation. Ecology letters, 18(6), 581-592.
• Bonthoux, S., Brun, M., Di Pietro, F., Greulich, S., & Bouché-Pillon, S. (2014). How can wastelands promote biodiversity in cities? A review. Landscape and urban planning, 132, 79-88.
• Dossier Friche Josaphat—Natagora Bruxelles. (n.d.). Retrieved April 24, 2023, from https://bruxelles.natagora.be/nos-actions/vigilance-et-reaction/dossier-friche-josaphat
• Friche Josaphat: Le projet du nouveau quartier dévoilé. (2023, April 6). Le Soir. https://www.lesoir.be/505826/article/2023-04-06/friche-josaphat-le-projet-du-nouveau-quartier-devoile
• Gandy, M. (2013). Marginalia: Aesthetics, ecology, and urban wastelands. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103(6), 1301-1316.
• Hoyle, H., Jorgensen, A., & Hitchmough, J. D. (2019). What determines how we see nature? Perceptions of naturalness in designed urban green spaces. People and nature, 1(2), 167-180.
• Phillips, C., & Atchison, J. (2020). Seeing the trees for the (urban) forest: more-than-human geographies and urban greening. Australian geographer, 51(2), 155-168.

Note: All drawings were realised by Charlotte Tiberghien