THE CITY OF TRANSITION
With most of the world’s population living in cities, the rapid and adaptive capacity for change and growth has become a defining characteristic of the contemporary global city. Reflecting this trend, the active redevelopment of Belgium’s largest cities, such as Brussels and Antwerp, has emerged as a pervasive backdrop for urban life. Reconstruction and deconstruction have turned the cityscape into a dynamic, ever-changing entity, offering the city new identities.
One can almost see the city “breathing” when discovering yet another block being turned into a void, a familiar building stripped to its skeletal frame or a city cathedral turned into a scaffolded space vessel. These daily manifestations reveal a city in flux: transitioning from a city that we used to know into a city that is yet to come.
Despite the omnipresence of this transitional redevelopment, there is little critical reflection on its role and meaning in urban life. Once stripped of their original functions and severed from fixed identities, transitional sites often fade into the background as culturally and collectively neglected “urban blanks” (Uribe Fores, 2023).
This absence of reflection highlights a deeper issue: the transitional city itself is disregarded. For urban residents, it represents temporary inconvenience; for developers, future profit; for construction workers, a task to complete; and for planners, an item on the to-do list. The transitional city has no place in the dictionary of common notions. The transitional city does not exist.
And yet, it does. It prompts us to confront a critical question:
What is the transitional city for the city itself?