Brussels as an international city

Abstract

La revue scientifique électronique pour les recherches sur Bruxelles / Het elektronisch wetenschappelijk tijdschrift voor onderzoek over Brussel / The e-journal for academic research on Brussels Notes de synthèse | 2009 Brussels as an international city Synopsis, CFB No. 13 Bruxelles, ville internationale Brussels as an international city

Global cities and cultural experimentation: cosmopolitan-local connections

“…The city is for instance known to have a less defined identity than other global cities such as London, Paris, or New York. This ambiguity is precisely what makes it an easy space to re-appropriate (Corijn et al, 2009). It thereby fits the description of creative cities as "uncomfortable" and "kicking over the traces" (Hall, 2000, p. 646).…”

Urban living and the search for new societal metaphors: Insights from Brussels participatory arts practices

“…Quite the contrary, Rea (2013) argues, as Brussels is a city built by waves of migrations, first by migratory flows within Belgium and, more recently by the many migratory movements that have turned Brussels into a culturally diverse city. Today, more than 40% of the households are linguistically mixed (Corijn & Vloeberghs, 2013) and English -not Dutch -is the second most commonly spoken language, yet there is also the use of Lingala, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian etc. (Janssens, 2018).…”

“…As the second richest region in Europe, but with an average income per capita that is 15% below the Belgian average, Brussels is a dual city. This duality is reflected by strong spatial segregation too, with a city centre occupied by the poor -the largest number of young people lives in the so-called 'poor crescent', just west of the pentagon -and the eastern residential areas attracting more affluent residents (Corijn & Vloeberghs, 2013).…”

Unequal and Asymmetric Internationalisation of Large Russian Cities

“…In the second body of literature, internationalisation is seen as "an incremental process, wherein firms… increase commitment to international markets in a gradual, step-wise, manner through a series of evolutionary 'stages' " (Bell et al, 2003, p. 339). In the context of cities, internationalisation is usually understood as a process of cities acquiring and strengthening their international functions (see Corijn et al, 2009;Kolossov, Vendina et O'Loughlin, 2002;Kolossov et Eckert, 2007). As pointed by Rozenblat and Pumain, a city's capacity to perform international functions relies on its relative position in the national urban system as well as on the position of its country in international networks (2018, p. 128).…”

“…11 Despite the high number of studies examining the globalisation of individual cities (Kolossov, Vendina et O'Loughlin, 2002;Corijn et al, 2009) and sets of cities in particular countries and macro-regions (Timberlake et al, 2014;Derudder et al, 2018), the need for cross-national and intra-national studies of city's internationalisation is still quite acute for several reasons. First, as the integration of regional and national urban systems into the global economy is uneven, there is a need for assessing modes of national urban systems' involvement in globalisation processes (Rozenblat, 2018).…”