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17 brUssels, tHe Central City of the Austrian Low Countries of the eighteenth century, became the official capital of Belgium in 1830. It was a medium-sized city of northwestern Europe, with some 80,000 inhabitants in 1770 and nearly five times as many a century and a half later (about 385,000 inhabitants around 1880).1 Not unusual in the European context, this growth occurred in a particular territorial framework. In fact, unlike other large Belgian cities (Liège, Antwerp, Ghent), Brussels did not merge administratively with its old faubourgs (suburbs) during the period. The latter retained all their political autonomy even though they had begun to form an urbanized unit with the central city. In 1830, despite its status as capital, Brussels was therefore paradoxically just a commune “like any other.” This reality, which was rooted in the country’s and state’s complex relationship with the capital and on some level distanced the city from its faubourgs, was a characteristic feature of the political-administrative framework that structured Brussels’s growth between 1830 and 1989 and still does even today. In this context, the radical transformations in water use during the nineteenth century, the transition from an Ancien Régime water regime to an industrial water regime, were particularly significant, participating fully in the redefinition of relations between the city and its inhabitants and, even more, between the city and its suburbs. In order to better convey and demonstrate how this transition occurred and what its consequences were, I use a fourstage approach. I first underscore the importance of embracing a large scale, not only from temporal and spatial but also functional perspectives, while describing the hydrogeographical context of the Brussels region. After briefly describing the workings and uses of the rivers at the end of the eighteenth •1 brUsseLs anD iTs rivers, 1770–1880 reshaping an Urban Landscape Chloé deligne 18 CHloé deligne century, I provide a detailed chronology of the transformations of the many uses of water in the region as a whole during the nineteenth century. Finally, I show how and why these transformations affected not only the ecological workings of the region’s water system but also the political relations among the actors in the management of the territory in question. a sYMPTOMaTiC DisaPPearanCe One of the defining events in the transformation of Brussels’s landscape in the nineteenth century is known as the “covering of the Senne.” Behind this famous name, familiar well beyond strictly Brussels circles, lies a massive urbanistic operation that “buried” the Senne in underground waterways, connected the sewage network up to it, and erected rectilinear boulevards lined with prestigious buildings above, modeled on Haussmannian Paris. Carried out between 1867 and 1871 under the direction of urban authorities , this massive undertaking is so closely associated with the disappearance of a now-idealized old city that the mere mention of it still evokes a sense of nostalgia today. Approved in 1865, just before a new cholera epidemic wiped out the working quarters clustered around the river, the covering of the Senne had the stated objective of eliminating an “open-air cesspool,” a “well of infection,” and erecting in place of this “gaping sewer” new, salubrious quarters that would better serve and be better suited to the capital of the young Belgian state (created in 1830). All in all, as studies devoted to it have shown,2 the operation merged the hygienist objective of eradicating quarters deemed unhealthy with the bourgeoisie’s desire to remodel the urban center in its own image. However—and the studies fail to adequately put this into perspective— the covering of the Senne was much more than an urbanistic operation: it was also a symptom of a more general transformation of relations between European cities and their water, for which the simple causal relationship with urban growth and water pollution must be substantially qualified or at least fleshed out. It is interesting to note, for instance, that some years before the Senne disappeared from the urban center another stream in the Brussels area (the Maelbeek) was covered in the same way, although it lay outside the urban core in as-yet largely unbuilt areas of the capital’s eastern faubourgs, where demographic growth had barely begun.3 Here, urbanization was clearly not the sole imperative behind the stream’s disappearance. We will return to this question later. Thus, from the mid-nineteenth century on, when demographic growth and industrialization were generating new ways of devising and...

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