Brussels in its pre-urbanistic days

There are many benefits at looking at the pre-urbanistic days of Brussels, i.e. the time when urbanism was not yet coined nor practiced as a profession, while the rapid urbanisation process was already taking place. In Agglomérer, set in the 19th Century, three benefits are present. They all relate to the way in which we, local researchers in urban studies, usually conceive - or should I say misconceive ? - 19th Century planning practice. First of all, the fragmented nature of Brussels is often traced back to the failure of 1854, when National Parliament decided to maintain municipal autonomy in the Brussels surroundings. The city-center would not be reunited into one bigger ur- ban entity. Still today, the 19 municpalities are held responsible for a lot of the city’s misfortunes. Instead, the book shows that the surroundings have been unified, consolidated, that the failure of 1854 was overcome, and that the territorial unity had nothing to do with municipal borders, but proceeded from the ways in which houses and streets were moulded in an overall coherent manner. There’s a difference between municipal unity and agglomerated of pre-urbanistic unity