Uplace's his open city in Machelen

Uplace is a project developer which wants to create a mega shopping-, entertainment- and leisure- site in Machelen, under the viaduct in Vilvoorde, next to Brussels. The target is a number of 8 million visitors yearly and has a surface of 900.000m². The Flemish government already delivered a urban planning permission to Uplace, on the terms that they would clean the ground under the viaduct.

 Now legal actions against the permission are taken by surrounding cities like Louvain, Vilvoorde and Grimbergen, but also by Unizo and Greenpeace. There is much media activity around this project and the actions against it. But why do they do this, when work is created and sanitary actions are taken? It’s easily explained by some points!

The main common issues are that such a mega shopping complex is harsh competition for the development of surrounding commercial centers, causing a traffic nightmare and creates a fake city with accompanying environmental problems. The ring of Brussels is saturated, but such a project is authorized. The main thing that can still stop this project is the delivery of an environmental permission, but 8 million visitors and 25,000 vehicle movements per day is certainly a negative effect on the environment. A major expansion of public transport to Uplace gets only a partial relief for the traffic. Mega malls for example are surely seen in the United States, but “they killed more than one American city”, as Tom Vandyck states in De Morgen

Why I consider this as a bubble is probably quiet clear. The project creates a city on its own. You can consider it as open, because the main thing for a shopping mall is to attract the people in, and then keep them there. So it’s open and closed in the same meaning. The project is open to the surrounding bubbles of the neighbor-cities, but wants to ‘steal’ in some way the life of the other bubbles, and surely the money.

source: De Morgen, Brussel Nieuws, De Standaard, vrt Terzake