In an age of climate change, cities are in transition. Many are developing planning tools in which landscape infrastructure becomes the starting point for urban thinking. The idea of the city as landscape is taking different forms and gradually gaining ground. Yet this approach to urban development is by no means a recent invention.
This lecture explores the history of Brussels through that lens. It shows that the city has a long tradition in this field, from the park system developed under Leopold II to the garden cities of the 1920s and Anderlecht’s Park System. It also asks how the cultural foundations of city-making can inform present and future practices, and how they can help respond to questions of environmental and social justice.