Some Brussels civil servant ‘ivory towers’

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Johan Leman, 13 January 2025

An anecdote. One day, we received on Foyer  a threat of a fine via a form with the title “délabrement de la maison”. An official had noticed that we had not put a card with ‘Foyer’ on it next to the doorbell. ‘Foyer’ was indeed written in large letters above the door, but it was not next to the doorbell. Now, you should just walk from place Sainctelette in the rue des Ateliers one day and you will wonder whether this is the priority that a civil service should be concerned with when walking there, and whether something more serious should not be noted.

Some people who have received a fine because they happened to put their yellow bag outside an hour too early will have experienced the same perplexity, when seeing that in the meantime, litter everywhere in the street remains a daily occurrence.

But that is Magritte’s Brussels. You talk to some municipal and regional civil servants about the concrete problems that everyone experiences (litter, poor-quality graffiti, drug dealing, etc.) and they lay a few cards on the table with nicely marked out walking routes and meeting places and accuse you of not having a vision of the future when you notice that you do not see all this as the first priority and the current concrete reality. But ask them if they have ever visited their imaginary walking paths in the dark at evening… and it turns out that this is not the case. The police are often accused of having too little contact with the real life of the neighbourhood. But this is not actually true. The police have been trying to establish those contacts for a long time. It is some regional and municipal civil servants who urgently need to be taken out of their ‘ivory towers’ and confronted with the facts. Many problems could be prevented by programming the administrations more realistically, with the involvement of people from the neighbourhood.

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