Four years after major agreements on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on their financing, today Heads of State and Government are reviewing the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in New York. The aim is to provide political guidance and identify actions to accelerate implementation.

All the reports already agree: progress is insufficient and the challenges are considerable. UN Secretary-General Guterres wants more ambition and concrete measures. Along with the Climate Action Summit, this should be the starting point for a decade of ambitious action.

More ambition, more multilateralism

Together with H.M. Queen Mathilde, who will give a speech at Columbia University as UN SDG Ambassador, Minister De Croo also argues for a more ambitious approach that is supported globally:

« No single government can reach the SDGs on its own and governments alone will not be able to respond to all challenges. The active engagement of the private sector, civil society and engaged citizens is crucial to move to a sustainable and inclusive economy ».

In addition to a joint commitment, our country also argues for building bridges between the various SDGs, between the climate and financing agenda. Agenda 2030 must be an inclusive agenda with an eye for the most vulnerable, gender equality and the emancipation of women and girls.

Belgium wants to set a good example. Two years ago, we were among the first group of countries to present their « Voluntary National Review ». Our commitment to Agenda 2030 also reflects from the 2018 SDG Index and Dashboards Report, which ranked Belgium twelfth in the implementation of the sustainable development agenda.

In addition to the SDG Summit, Minister De Croo will also have numerous bilateral contacts over the next few days to emphasize Belgium’s commitment to the SDGs. He will thus meet UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner, UNICEF Director Henriette Fore and Global Fund Director Peter Sands.

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Brussels was ranked as the 24th safest city in the world. In this case, it stands behind Paris (23rd),New York (15th), London (14th), and Chicago (11th).

Amsterdam is the safest city in Europe and also the 5th in the world. Copenhagen also ranks in the top ten safest cities, occupying the 8th place.

The Safe Cities Index 2019 is a report from The Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by NEC Corporation. The report is based on the third iteration of the index, which ranks 60 cities across 57 indicators covering digital security, health security, infrastructure security and personal security.

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Her journey

Edith Cavell was the eldest daughter of the Reverend Frederick Cavell and his wife, Louisa. Even as a young girl, she was a talented artist and activist, extraordinarily raising the equivalent of nearly €40,000 for the local Sunday School by selling illustrated cards. Edith was educated at Norwich High School for Girls and various UK boarding schools, before a period as a governess, including in Brussels. But it was her return to England to look after her sick father that would eventually lead to a career in nursing.

After training in London Hospital, she worked in hospitals around the UK and as a private travelling nurse. Eleven years later she was recruited by Dr Antoine Depage (founder of the Belgian Red Cross) to L’École Belge d’Infirmières Diplômées and by 1910, she was to become the Matron for a new secular hospital in St Gilles. She felt nursing in Belgium was well enough developed at this time to merit the launch of the nursing journal, L’Infirmière. She went on to train nurses for three hospitals, 24 schools and thirteen nurseries in Belgium.

When the First World War broke out, Edith was back in the UK, visiting her widowed mother. She insisted on returning to Brussels where her clinic had been taken over by the Red Cross.

First World War

While the Red Cross treated soldiers of all nationalities, its nurses were not supposed to take part in the war on either side. However, after the Battle of Mons in August, British soldiers were left stranded and Edith heard stories of them being shot, alongside the locals who assisted them.

In the autumn of 1914, when two British soldiers found their way to Edith’s clinic, she harboured them for two weeks. Others followed. Gradually an underground network was established to allow the soldiers safe passage out of Belgium through the Netherlands, with the help of false papers from Prince Reginald de Croy and guides organised by the architect Philippe Baucq. The secret password for this nine-month operation was allegedly YORC – Croy backwards.

Edith hid her activity from colleagues in order to protect them but her initial outspokenness about the need to care for all, regardless of nationality, had drawn attention. By summer 1915, German police were closing in and intimidating Cavell, who had been deeply shaken by the death of her friend Marie Depage (Antoine’s wife) when the HMS Lusitania was sunk. She continued her clandestine work, although she knew now that her actions were punishable by death.

Arrest

Philippe Baucq was arrested on July 15 1915, and Edith’s arrest followed on August 3. She’d sewn her diary into a cushion and no evidence was found but she was betrayed by a man later convicted of collaboration by the French courts.

After 72 hours of interrogation, she was tricked into confessing when officers told her others had already revealed the whole story and she could save them by telling the truth. She believed this promise, although four of her fellow resistants were later sentenced to death.

Incarceration

Cavell spent 10 weeks in a spartan cell in St Gilles prison where she wrote letters to her family and to the nursing school on money matters. She requested just a few items, among them ‘blue and white combs from my drawer, a small notebook and hankies’. She reportedly told a Reverend, ‘Life for me has always been hurried and full of difficulty. These weeks in prison have been a time of rest. I have had time to read, to pray and to reflect.’

Diplomatic Efforts

The Germans were convinced that Cavell’s actions were belligerent and thus she had forfeited any protection for medical personnel under the 1906 Geneva Convention. While the British government claimed it could not assist Cavell and that any intervention would do more harm than good, the United States had not yet joined the war and did apply some diplomatic pressure.

The US First Secretary in Brussels put it to the Germans that executing Cavell would further damage their international reputation after the sinking of the Lusitania, which had caused revulsion in the civilized world.

Cavell’s humanitarian work resulted in a call for pardon by the German Civil Governor. But Count Harrach, (the man who had given Archduke Franz Ferdinand the car he was assassinated in), stated he’d prefer to see Cavell shot than see any more harm done to German soldiers and lamented that there were not ‘three or four old English women to shoot.’

To make matters worse, the Military Governor of Brussels, General von Sauberzweig, was supposedly bitter because his son had been blinded fighting the British. Sauberzweig ordered Cavell’s execution on 11 October 1915.

Death

At 8.30pm on the same day, Edith learned her fate from German Army Chaplain, Pastor Le Seur. She was visited in her cell by an Anglican chaplain, Sterling Gahan, who described her as clothed in her dressing gown and ready for the night. Together they took communion, and she told him, ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.’

Early the next morning, nurses wept and German soldiers bowed their heads as Edith Cavell was taken from the St Gilles prison with Philippe Baucq to the Tir National, where she was put before a firing squad of 16 men. Le Seur bound her eyes, which he said were filled with tears.

She had completed the last entry in her diary which read, ‘Died at 07h on 12th October 1915.’ She was 49.

Fall Out and Legacy

The Germans had worried that mercy towards Cavell would inspire other women, no longer fearful of retribution, to join the resistance. Cavell’s execution however proved a huge mistake. The US Embassy ensured the story was published in the press and there was international condemnation. Public opinion veered against the Germans and the Americans joined the war. Army recruitment in the UK doubled for the two months following news of the shooting.

Propaganda like this was against Cavell’s last wishes. On the evening before her death, Chaplain Gahan had told her, ‘We shall always remember you as a heroine and a martyr.’ Her response? ‘Don’t think of me like that. Think of me as a nurse who tried to do her duty.’

Later, Cavell would be awarded the Belgian Cross of the Order of Leopold and Croix Civique and France awarded her the Légion d’Honneur. She was exhumed from her burial place in St Gilles in 1919 and taken to England, where there was a procession of hundreds of nurses, soldiers, marching bands and civilians, and a service in Westminster Abbey attended by royalty and politicians.

Edith Cavell was finally laid to rest in Norwich, near her birthplace. As well as numerous memorials in Brussels, she is honoured all over the world, including a mountain in Canada.

Perhaps the last word should go to the German poet, Gottfried Benn, who was a senior German doctor in Brussels at the time. He wrote of Cavell’s execution: ‘I followed the trial from first to last and frequently spoke with her. I certified her death, closed her eyes, and placed her body in the coffin. She was the bravest woman I ever met.’

>> Read another portrait: Ingrid Daubechies <<

The post Portrait: Edith Cavell appeared first on Brussels Express.

Nationality: French

Profession: Director, Committee of the Regions, EU

« In Belgium we’re totally divided . . . the national football team is the only unifying point in the whole country. »

‘One of the hardest-working people you’ll meet’ I was told as I was taken through security at the Committee of the Regions building on Belliard. My guide was talking about Laurent Thieule, who kindly took a few moments out of his day to speak to Brussels Express.

Mr Thieule, could you begin by telling us a little about your professional journey?

I had been working in France, which is my native country, until the age of 40, and then I came to Brussels a bit randomly because I had the opportunity to join the Committee of the Regions during its infancy in 1994, so 25 years ago. We left France and I said to my wife, who is Belgian, we’re coming back to your home country! She told me she wasn’t so happy – she thought I wouldn’t like the way of life, the rain, the big contrast with Montpellier. But we came here with the whole family and we had our third child at the end of the year.

I don’t live in the city; I live out in Wezembeek-Oppem, out of Brussels near the airport, and I only come into the city for working.

In terms of my career, I started working in Paris in the Assemblée Nationale and stayed for three years and then I joined the Languedoc Roussillon Regional Assembly, and I was Head of the Cabinet of the President of the Region for 18 years. I was very committed to sporting events and was CEO of the 1993 Mediterranean Games.

What were your first impressions of Brussels?

The first time I came through Brussels was in a taxi from the airport and passing the Cinquantenaire Arc de Triomphe, I thought, ‘This is a nice city; I like it.’ Then you arrive on Rue de la Loi where the traffic is so busy and then Belliard, which is even more polluted – the most polluted street in Europe – so I was very shocked. Immediately, I saw there was a contrast of architecture and urbanism from one neighbourhood to the other. I had an impression of huge chaos, with a lot of building work going on, a lot of traffic. Compared to Paris and London, here nothing feels designed and the urban concept does not exist. But the chaos is very human and very diverse, and I like this diversity.

I’m the owner of a vineyard in the south of France, in the village where my father was Mayor for 30 years and I have strong family roots. So, I decided to buy a vineyard with my family. I go back there to take care of the harvest. I like to have a link to my native village. I feel more French than Belgian, and more French than European I have to say. There’s now a plane route with Ryan Air to Montpellier, so I go back every month, because my mother and siblings still live there and I have the land to take care of. I’m not homesick, because I can go back there often, but I do feel more French than Belgian.

Even after all this time? What is it, you think, that makes you feel French rather than Belgian? 

I suppose French schools, French education, French history. The French heroes we have. For me Napoleon is a hero (I’m sorry about that!). Générale de Gaulle is a hero. The beauty of the country, the culture, the French language – it’s a beautiful language to listen to, to read, to speak . . . and it’s one of the founding countries for democracy in the world. The Declaration of Human Rights. So this is in my blood, my DNA. Kylian Mbappé is another hero of mine. When we won the World Cup in Russia, I was in the stadium and I cried during the Marseillaise! It was great. We felt really French and proud to be there.

However I try not to compare and I don’t feel homesick. In my football club they call me Le Francais. They like my accent when I speak French. When I go to the north of the country where people speak Flemish, the first thing I say is ‘Sorry, I don’t speak Flemish because je suis francais.’ They accept this and don’t mind speaking French to me. Many Flemish people go to the south of France on holiday, so they accept it. Often they don’t accept speaking French with other Belgian people, but when you explain that you’re French, they are tolerant and will share some words with you in the language of Moliere.

My main concern when I came to Brussels was to be integrated in my new city, because I think that people like me – civil servants, migrants, people coming from the outside – they have to make the effort to be integrated. Successful integration is a two-way effort. People welcome you, but you have to make the most effort to be integrated. My wife found a job at Kraainem Primary School when we arrived, and I immediately went to register in Kraainem Football Club, and now I’ve been the President of the Club for ten years.

All my friends are native Belgians. I belong to a cycling association and I’m President of the football club and so I’ve done my best since day one to share the city and way of life with Belgian people. In other words, I have no private relationships with European civil servants. I see them all day, every day, all the year, but I think if you want to integrate successfully you have to share your time, your passions, your family with the people living in the city. So I did my best to be accepted as an integrated newcomer.

Your relationship with the football club there has been quite phenomenal. Very successful.

Yes. The thing I’m most proud of at the football club is the diversity of the people. We have 350 kids, of more than 42 nationalities, so it’s a big multi-cultural platform which creates strong social capital. We decided four years ago in 2015 to launch an initiative welcoming young refugees to the club. Three days a week, for the last four years, we’ve been welcoming a group of young refugees, all minors, unaccompanied asylum-seekers. We pick them up in the refugee centre in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday evenings. They do some French or English courses and then they play football in teams with the young kids from our club. They have dinner and we take them back to their centre. It’s a big integration success. Over the four years, we’ve welcomed around 2000 unaccompanied minors. We’re supported by the European Commission, Erasmus+ Programme, by the UEFA Foundation for Children, and by other foundations and private companies, so it’s a huge programme. It’s a European Pilot Project and this is one of my greatest achievements since coming to Brussels. I’m very proud of it, because we’ve shown that integration is possible with a diverse community. Diversity adds value and is not an obstacle.

Will you go back to France when you retire?

I don’t know. In two years I will be old enough to stay at home every morning. I think I will share my life between Brussels and my village because my roots are still there. My children are here and they are 29, 27, and 24 years old and they’re having new families of their own, so I think my wife would like to stay here for the grandchildren. Luckily with Ryan Air, we have a chance to share our life between the south of France and Brussels.

But regarding the European Institutions – just one word on this, because I’ve always worked in political assemblies: the Assemblée Nationale, then the Regional Assembly in the south of France, and now the European institutions – I like and appreciate working for politicians. They don’t all have a great reputation, but I have to say that elected local people are very useful for maintaining democracy, for maintaining social cohesion, for maintaining integration solutions. When they are criticized, I have to say that the big, big majority of politicians are honest, are not corrupt and are committed to a sense of democracy and citizenship which is great and useful for the European Union, the member states and regional assemblies.

If you were Mayor in Brussels or in charge of the Brussels Capital Region, what would your first action be?

Mobility. Mobility has become a mess for people commuting in and out of Brussels. We need to facilitate cycling and collective transport. The burning issue is mobility in Brussels. We have the hugest traffic jams in Europe and this is not acceptable. Ever since I came to Brussels, there’s been talk about the TER, the inter-regional train, but it’s a dream; they’ve been discussing and discussing it for years. For people coming to Brussels from outside, it’s a nightmare every day and this is not great. When you go to the north of Europe – to Copenhagen, Amsterdam, or Stockholm, you have 37% of the population riding bicycles to work. This is the solution. But here, if you take a bicycle to Rue de la Loi, it’s a big risk, you could be killed by a car at any time of day. The big issue is mobility in Brussels. I would put a lot of public investment into restoring the pistes cyclables, the avenues and giving harmony to pedestrians. Also, more park-and-rides at the metro stations, so you could park your car and take the metro if you live in the surrounding neighbourhoods, which is not the case at the moment. It’s a huge caseload for the President of Brussels Capital.

What has your attention in the news at the moment?

I don’t read anything about Brexit any more. Every day I read Le Monde and Le Soir, and L’Equipe because I’m a football fan. I’ve been keenly following how Macron has tried to manage the gilets jaunes situation in France and his organisation of the grand debat and citizen dialogues. I think it’s a great experiment in participative democracy, but we’re still waiting to see what policies he commits to. It’s important because, in Belgium, the government have done a lot of financial reform which was very profitable for the country. In France, there hasn’t been enough courage to do the same. If we want to reform the country, and France is a very difficult place to reform because the French are very conservative, we need a strong President. Macron must show that he has the political will to change things, which was the case of the Charles Michel government here. The problem in Belgium is that the political situation is never stable and we can sometimes go months without having a majority government, and this penalises us a lot. It delays the process of reforming this country. It’s a pity because the people in the north of Flanders are keen on change and giving more freedom to companies and more flexibility to the labour market, in order to reform the employment situation in Belgium. Some people are ready to change, but the government must be stable and ready to act.

Would you draw any other comparisons between France and Belgium, or Montpellier in particular and Brussels?

Brussels’s specificity is its diversity. I’ve never seen such a diverse city. It’s really multi-cultural. When you go from one street to another, the cultural context changes and this is a richness, an added-value for the municipality. I’ve found the Mayor, Philippe Close, very clever. He says diversity adds value for building up new social cohesion.

In the south of France, we have a big majority of cities where the Front National dominates political life. In my village, 65% of voters voted Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election. You cannot imagine! In a lot of cities, this is the case. Macron was seen as a new political wave, but he has some difficulty because people are out in the street. As I said, to reform the French is a challenge, because there are people who have privileges who want to keep their privileges. They don’t want to work more, until they’re older. They want to keep their car. They want to keep everything they have and they don’t want to share and to be part of the process of reform.

In Belgium, the main characteristic of the capital city is diversity, and the characteristic of the country is that we have two countries. We’re totally divided. Flanders is another country. When you go from one village at the border of Flanders into a Wallonian village, it’s a new country. You don’t speak the same language, you don’t have the same music, or the same actors on the TV. It’s totally different. When confederalist fans, like NVA (New Flemish Alliance) say we have to move to a confederal system, I understand their vision but it’s not my story; it’s the story of the Belgian people. They have to decide themselves about their future. But for now, we’re two different countries with a border, not with different laws or different social security, but the national football team is the only unifying point in the whole country! If social security were regionalised, that would totally be the end of the Belgian story of one linked country, because the only link between the people is this solidarity between the north and the south.

You often hear about people in Flanders complaining that they subsidise Wallonia. Is that sense of social solidarity breaking down?

It’s just about maintained by the federal system of social security. If we change and regionalise social security, we’ll divide the country definitively. Solidarity will be killed. I can understand the Flemish mentality is totally different to those in the south, because some in the south are too ‘assisted’. In the north, when you see the companies which are created, the jobs they create, the dynamism of the people – even the farmers are different to the south. When you look at the big farms in the north of this country, they’re different to the small farms with a few cows you have in Wallonia which are helped by the Common Agricultural Policy from Brussels. There’s a cultural mentality of being ‘assisted’ by the regional and federal government and by the European Union. This is the typical situation in the south of the country. The south of the country is not capable by itself of facing political and economic challenges.

Do you have any anecdotes or experiences of Belgian surrealism?

I had a sport experience, in cyclo-cross – cross-country cycling – where they cycle across fields and up and down. It’s a spectacular Belgian sport, a national sport, and there’s a Belgian championship here. Once I went to a village near Brussels, called Vossem, and there was a cyclo-cross circuit there. At one point, in a flat field they’d put a tent, with two bars either side – and the cyclists were riding through the middle of the tent! The people, the fans, were drinking beers and watching the cyclists riding in between the two bars. That was totally surrealistic!

What advice would you give to people coming to Brussels in the future?

I meet a lot of kids in my football club, and here in my office; people looking for jobs. My advice is: never regret what you do. Be mobile. The world is huge. Go out, far from your parents’ cocoon, and discover the world. And don’t regret what you do. If you decide to come to Brussels, it’s a brilliant idea, don’t look back to your past but project yourself into the future. The future is always brilliant if you accept that mobility is the key issue for the new generation. I advise people coming into the labour market to open their eyes and see the opportunities they have outside of their house, outside of their city, out of their country. That’s the advice I would give. Never regret what you do. Life is short, but never regret.

Good advice! Some quickfire final questions: do you have any favourite shops in Brussels?

I never go shopping! I go shopping when my wife obliges me to buy trousers for the beginning of winter. It takes me a quarter of an hour to buy three pairs of trousers or a suit. I never go shopping. I like some places – more bars than shops. I know a small bar in a village – you should go there – in the small village of Vossem near Tervuren. You have the Church, and behind the Church is a bar where you can get a beer for less than one euro! It’s the cheapest bar in Europe I think! The name is In Den Congo, because the Congo was a former Belgian colony. There are posters of Tintin in the Congo. It’s great. It’s a very strange place, where everything – beer, coca cola, orange juice – is one euro or less. It’s where I used to go for a beer every Saturday morning after my cycle ride.

That’s a great tip! Does that mean that beer is your favourite Belgian specialty?

Absolutely. When I first came to Brussels, I never drank beer, but now I can drink beer just like any Belgian friend of mine. This goes back to what I said at the start of our conversation. You have to make the effort to be integrated. If you drink pastis in Belgium, people won’t understand, so please, drink beer and fit in with the people welcoming you!

And yet, there seems a lot more variety in the way people drink here than in the UK. I’ve seen workmen, labourers, in their work trousers with tool pockets, come into bars in Belgium and order a bottle of sparkling white wine to drink between them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that in the UK because there’s a silly assumption that white wine is a ‘woman’s drink’.

I drink white wine because I produce white wine in my vineyard in my village. But in Belgium it depends on the clientele of the bar. In my football club we drink a lot of beer. Last Saturday we had a full day of matches and we drank 2000 beers in one day!

2000 beers! For how many people?

Hundreds of people. At the end of the day I went to the kitchen, and they’d sold over 2000 beers. And I was one of them!

What’s your best memory of Brussels?

The birth of my third kid, Pauline. She was born in December 1994 in the Hôpital Saint-Luc. The birth of a child is always the best moment of your life.

Any personal wishes linked to the city?

The city must not change from a sociological point of view. Diversity is the main asset of Brussels, but transportation should be improved.

Read another portrait: mathematician Ingrid Daubechies

The post Portrait: Laurent Thieule – Director, Committee of the Regions, EU appeared first on Brussels Express.

Nationality: Belgian-American

Profession: Mathematician

We went to Philadelphia Museum of Art, and my son was seven and running ahead. Suddenly he came back, white-faced, and said, ‘Mama, I saw something terrible!’

Baroness Ingrid Daubechies is one of the world’s foremost mathematicians, known for her work on wavelets and image-compression technology. Her research has been used, among many applications, in JPEG2000, in imaging from the Hubble telescope and in authenticating works of art. She was the first tenured female professor of mathematics at Princeton and has won numerous accolades, including recently the L’Oréal-Unesco For Women in Science Award. Here, in our second ‘Portrait’, she shares her drive to promote mathematics, her love of Brussels and her taste for all things ‘quirky’.

Can you give a brief introduction to your journey?

I’m originally from Belgium. I have dual citizenship now and I jumped through a lot of hoops after I became an American to retrieve my Belgian citizenship. I really care about it. Maybe it’s not the case these days, but at the time it definitely felt like the authorities wanted to test whether you were serious about it. You had to assemble a whole lot of documents within a period of three months; none of them could be older than that. I was born in Limburg. I speak Flemish and I’m fluent in French as well because I learned it as a child. My father was one of the few French-speaking Belgians outside Brussels who is absolutely fluent in Flemish, because he grew up in the Flemish part of the country and went to school there because of the war.

At the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), I got my undergraduate Physics degree and stayed on to do a doctorate. Both degrees were in Physics, so I’m kind of a cheat as a mathematician! I don’t have a math degree beyond the first two years. I did extra courses, extra exams, because I thought I might switch to math, but then I decided to stick with Physics and I’ve never regretted that. All the Physics I learnt has stood me in good stead and I was able to learn the extra math that I need every day on my own.

In 2010, on a sabbatical, I started organising a mathematical contest for Belgian high school students. The idea was that it would help teachers show their students that mathematics is much more than the formulaic things you get in text books. The competition asks questions that are ‘outside of the box’, questions you can’t answer just by rote reproduction of things you’ve learned; it requires mathematical thinking. It’s become very popular and is called Wiskunnend Wiske (loosely translated as ‘Mathematical Mary’) and has its own Facebook page. Schools and classes participate – or even groups of students, they don’t have to be a school. A group of students could get together and participate in that way. Questions are sent to them, and they have a number of weeks to mull them over. Then the classes that do best, forty or fifty, come to Brussels as close as possible to 14 March, which is Pi Day you see (3.14), for the final of the contest. At the same time, they visit Brussels and the VUB and see that it’s not too difficult to go to university to study math.

What was it like as a female student of Physics in Brussels in the 70s?

In Physics, we were 2 women out of 17 students, but many of our classes in the first two years were combined with the mathematics students and at that time there were quite a few young women studying mathematics in Brussels. Many of them were thinking of becoming high school teachers of mathematics. Almost all high school math teachers in Belgium used to be trained in mathematics. I understand that that’s no longer the case, which is a sad thing because high school teaching in the Flemish region was of excellent quality back then, as was borne out by international comparisons. There is a programme called TIMS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and at that time the Flemish part of the country participated in TIMS and did very, very well, partly due I think to the high quality of teaching.

Now, unfortunately, there are fewer trained mathematicians who go into high school teaching. I’m not saying others can’t teach the material well, but the one thing you do lack if you’re not part of the field is wherewithal, the resources to call upon if a kid doesn’t quite understand something the standard way, or if they have good reasoning but are unconventional, for example. If you think of teaching literature, and there’s a student who resonates especially with one type of literature, only part of the canon, then, because you know literature, you can point them towards something – say Magic Realism, to really keep them engaged. So I think, in history or in language, teachers know how to do that, but in mathematics, if you’re not trained or you’re wary of mathematics yourself, you lose that richness. Also, textbooks in mathematics are very often written in rigid ways with little blue blocks containing formulas, and students think, ‘Oh, I need to know these off by heart’ instead of trying to get to the essence of things.

It’s one of my hobby-horses, so that’s one of the reasons why I thought it would be useful to have the Wiskunnend Wiske contest. We took the comic book character Wiske, and I’m very glad that  the publishers of Suske and Wiske agreed to us using the image. They even drafted some special drawings for the contest. Dutch is one of the few languages in which the name for mathematics doesn’t have that ‘mathema’ root. If you think of German or French or English or Italian or Spanish, it’s always ‘mathema’ but in Dutch it’s ‘wiskunde’ which was a name coined by Simon Stevin, centuries ago. The character ‘Wiske’ is an emblematic cartoon figure and many of the book titles are alliterative… so the name Wiskunnend Wiske was perfect for the contest. Plus, I wanted to encourage more girls because, with fewer people studying mathematics to become high school teachers, the number of women has dropped. It’s still higher in Belgium than in neighbouring countries, but it’s not as high as it could be. Actually when people say, ‘Oh maybe there are fewer women in mathematics because it’s just not “women’s thing”’, I ask them to look at the percentage of women in mathematics in academia across Europe. The percentages differ enormously, which shows it’s a cultural thing because our genetics don’t differ that much. The map of Europe really helps me make that case with American colleagues.

It’s cultural in many ways. There’s the general culture in a society which holds that those maths, science or engineering jobs are not ‘good jobs for women’ or that somehow women aren’t suitable for that work. When, as a result of this, young women don’t see many others in mathematical professions, they worry – maybe these are jobs where it’s not as easy to combine a family and a career. A lack of role models has consequences. For instance, how many female plumbers have you seen in your life? I’ve only seen one and when I met her I realised she was the first. No one would suggest, I don’t think, that women are not suitable to be plumbers but, because there are so few, it’s something girls don’t think of doing.

The other thing is, in the States and many other countries, we are actually graduating many more women than we see reflected in academia. I think what happens is, you have choices as a mathematician where you go and the culture and role models influence those choices. There’s ample evidence that small things are said that make a difference. People don’t even realise that they betray a bias, but many of those micro-aggressions – and I say that although they’re not meant as aggressive necessarily by the people who say them – the micro-aggressions give you pause. If you don’t feel comfortable, why would you stay there? Why would you not go to a job where you feel better and valued? I think culture everywhere matters – in general society and in sub-communities – in attracting and retaining women. I have a very cynical friend who says, ‘The number of women you find in a given country in academia in mathematics, is inversely proportional to a kind of weighted average of how much money you can make there as an academic and how much prestige your job has. Look at Portugal,’ he says. ‘There, you don’t make a lot of money; you don’t have a lot of prestige. Tons of women. Look at Switzerland: lots of money, lots of prestige. Almost no women.’ I haven’t tested that theory out, but at least anecdotally it seems an explanation.

Why Brussels and what were your first impressions of the city?

When I was due to go to university, my father was working in two different locations, commuting between Antwerp and Brussels, and my parents decided that he could just as well commute in the other direction. So, we moved to Brussels and I still lived at home when I went to the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

It was the first time that we had lived near a big city and to be honest, during my undergraduate years I didn’t explore much of Brussels. Although my parents had moved to Brussels, they hadn’t really studied the transportation very well and I had to take three consecutive buses and trams to get to the campus. Classes started at 8 am, and I would get up a 5.45 am and take a bus at 6.17 am. Classes finished at 5pm or 7pm, so I didn’t have that much time to explore. But as a graduate student, I moved out of home, so there was more opportunity.

I like Brussels. I liked Brussels before, but it’s become much more live-able now. There are many little corners that have been spruced up. I find Brussels a really funky place. It was always a place where you could find a lot of different types of good food but culturally, now, it’s also a very fun and funky and diverse place.

Even though I went to the States for a post-doctoral appointment, I thought eventually I would continue my life in Belgium. I came back and had tenure with NFWO (Nationaal Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek). Then I met the man who’s now my husband, who was in Belgium for a three-month visit. When we decided to get married, I applied for jobs in the States. He promised me that if I couldn’t get used to life in the States, we would apply for jobs together in Europe, but it turned out that was unnecessary.

I still have very strong links with Brussels. I go back to the VUB often and my parents still live near Brussels in Woluwe Saint Stephen and I visit them a lot. They are elderly and a bit frail, so there are many reasons to return.

Could you draw some parallels between other countries where you’ve lived and Belgium? What is similar, what is not? How did the differences you encountered change you?

I first came to the US as a post-doc, so I was 26 and at that time I couldn’t afford to go back to Belgium very often; tickets were very expensive, so it was a year before I returned. It was during the Reagan years, and I knew that when I came to the US that there would be aspects of life that would be different. I expected to be shocked by some things. At that point, for example, there weren’t as many homeless in Europe and there were quite a few in New York. I was shocked by that.

But what I had not expected at all was that I would have a culture shock going back to Belgium. There were things that I had surreptitiously gotten used to in the States. Like many Belgians I know, when I first came to the US, I was a little bit turned off by what I thought was the superficial friendliness, the ‘Have a nice day’, ‘How are you?’ and so on. When it’s just people saying that in a store, many Belgians think, ‘Oh my God, they are forced to say this, even if they don’t feel like it. It’s so degrading.’ But that’s the Belgian take on it. The people doing those jobs don’t think, ‘I’m degrading myself.’  Yes, they’ve been asked to be friendly and they try to be friendly. True, they haven’t thought deeply about how profoundly they wish you, personally, a really nice day. But just trying to be friendly makes the person doing it feel better as well. So they get a little benefit out of it themselves! It’s just something that helps lubricate things. And that’s not at all how I perceived it, but then I went back to Belgium and experienced the less friendly Belgian attitudes again I thought, ‘Oh my God! Why are these people so difficult with me? Why do they go to this extra effort to spoil their own day and mine?!’ I would never have thought that, if I hadn’t had the American experience. Of course, it turns out neither perception is completely accurate: it’s complicated, but it wouldn’t even have occurred to me to reflect on it at all, if I hadn’t left Belgium.

So, I think the whole world would be better if, at this impressionable age where you’re a young adult, you had to leave for somewhere else. If there were a way to make people really realise what diversity means; not just see the Other but have a long enough immersion in a culture so that you can understand. I don’t know how you do that and maybe it’s one of these ‘do-good’ impulses that are decried as not possible. But coming to the US certainly made me realise for the first time, there are choices you make in a culture. Some of those Belgian choices I still like. I like the European preference regarding food, for taste over looks. It’s the opposite in the States where the food might look more impressive, but the ingredients don’t taste as good. I notice the quality of the ingredients every time I go back to Belgium, and I’m talking about in the supermarket; it’s not like I’m going direct to the producer. So, there are choices that every culture makes, and it’s about knowing that they are choices and that things don’t have to be that way. Cultures evolve also. That’s what older people always say: ‘It used to be different.’ Yes, it used to be different and some things were better and some things were not.

Do you gravitate towards people of similar culture to yours?

When I hear people speak Dutch, I may introduce myself, whether they are Belgian or from the Netherlands, and when I know people are Belgian, I try to make a link, but I don’t really seek them out. I haven’t started a Belgian Club here. In museums too, I feel linked to Belgium. My son was very struck by the existence of the Flemish Primitives and that there was a time when Belgium was at this high point, culturally, in Europe.

When the children were little, together with a Dutch friend, we sewed a costume for Sinterklaas, and found a Belgian or Dutch man who would play Sinterklaas. At that point, I found all the Dutch-speaking children in the neighbourhood, even people I knew only by sight at the time, and I said, ‘Look, we have this Sinterklaas and it’s more fun if there’s more kids.’ So, the parents would buy the presents themselves. We gave them a cap of $20 and Sinterklaas would come in with his big bag. At the time, there was not yet the same sensitivity in Europe about blackface as there is now, but even so, the sensitivity existed in the States, and we didn’t want to get into that at all, so we never had a Zwarte Piet.

But my kids believed. In fact, my daughter believed in Sinterklaas for much much longer than in Father Christmas. Everyone had told her about Father Christmas, but Sinterklaas she saw every year, and nobody at school had told her because they didn’t know, so they couldn’t debunk it for her. When she was 12 or so, I was convinced she knew and we promoted her to be Sinterklaas’s helper and she was crestfallen. She was 12! There’s no kid I know in the world at 12 who still believes. Then she embraced it and insisted that we keep doing it until she left for college, because she liked it so much. We had a big book and ahead of time, parents would send us all the ‘good things and bad things’ and Sinterklaas would read it out and call up the children. So we did that, but we didn’t go into the whole ‘saint’ thing. We went in for the food! I was not brought up with a religious framework. I’m an agnostic and I didn’t bring my children up within a religion. I explained to them about religions, but we don’t really observe religious festivals apart from a Christmas tree, because I think that’s great fun.

When I was at Princeton, my parents came over and we went to Philadelphia Museum of Art, and my son was seven and running ahead. Suddenly he came back, white-faced, and said, ‘Mama, I saw something terrible! There was this incredible painting and they were torturing somebody. They had nailed him to a wooden construction!’ And I thought, he doesn’t know! I had grown up with these Christian images and I was much older when I started questioning them because I had always seen them, but he hadn’t. To him, it was a revelation – this suffering person. I mean, why would they paint this?! So I explained. In the middle of the museum, I sat him down and said, ‘There’s this thing.’

How many times a year do you return to your country? Why? What do you enjoy doing?

I’ve always come back to Belgium at least once a year, but now I’m back more often. There was one year I came back about ten times for my parents. but right now I come back every two or three months. We also communicate via Skype.

Brussels is so much smaller than New York. Brussels is more the size of Boston. And I know parts of Brussels so much better. So I don’t really compare them, but I enjoy Brussels and, of course, not being there all the time, I try to discover new things. Walking around, looking. I have subscriptions to The Bulletin and read it online, and if I’m there for special festivals I like to go. Last year, I was there for a sabbatical for six months. The first six months of 2018, we lived in Brussels and we enjoyed it hugely. We took the tram where you can have a gourmet meal. It was a lot of fun: you look out the window and you say, ‘Oh that’s where we are!’ and the meal was excellent. It’s a fun experience. I really enjoyed it.

All things Belgian resonate with me. When I go back to Belgium, I feel it’s home. I like traditional Belgian foods. There’s a cookbook which was quite successful, called ‘Everybody Eats Well in Belgium’ by a Flemish woman (Ruth Van Waerebeek), who lives in the States. She shares her grandmother’s recipes. I’ve given it as a present to people when they come to my house. If they like what I’ve cooked and it’s a close friend, I’ll buy them the book.

If you were mayor of one of the 19 Brussels communes or if you were Minister-President of the Brussels-Capital Region, what would you do as your first action?

That’s a question I can’t really answer! Just the idea of being Mayor of anything would be so frightening to me. I mean, in my profession I have done quite a bit of ‘service’. I was President of the International Mathematical Union and so on, and I see it as service. The one thing I did not like about it was the political aspect. Trying to get people with strong personalities and different points of view to reach a positive outcome. Just the sheer idea! It’s not my talent and I don’t want to get into that again.

I think a strong point of Brussels is its diversity for a town of its size. London or Paris you expect to be diverse, but Brussels is much more diverse than you expect and I think that’s great. So, I’d look for ways of embracing that… and Brussels has many ways of embracing it. Ways of dealing with ‘allergies’ that people might develop, like xenophobia. I think that’s a big challenge everywhere. I mean, I live in the States where there is a President who is encouraging that. I think it’s important not just to counter it but to look at initiatives that have worked. That’s the problem. You may well have goodwill but, because people’s reactions come from complicated roots, emotional connections in many ways, there are some well thought-of initiatives that don’t work and others that do. So trying to study that is important. We need to learn much better how to do that.

I do believe in education. That’s my big bias. I believe that through education you can really show that talent can be anywhere. Fostering it and helping it to develop is a way in which you open people’s eyes, in different groups.

Do you have any anecdote about Belgians, about Brussels?  Or an example of “Belgium surrealism”? 

My husband is British. When we met, he was in Belgium for three months. He had the impression that Belgians got up every day thinking that today might be the day they would have a traffic accident and it would not be their fault. They imagine an accident and their first question is not, ‘Was anybody hurt? Are you okay?’ but ‘Was it your fault?’ Because the big thing is, will the insurance cover you or not? So, he was puzzled by the aggressive driving.

One day I said, ‘What happens if I die first? My deposit box will be blocked and you won’t be able to get your things out of it.’

Also, inheritance laws. If there’s a little bit of wealth in the family, almost everyone I know in Belgium, tries to find strategies to hide some of it from the government for inheritance. At least, it used to be like this. I don’t know if it’s still the case. I told my mother I didn’t want to do this, so we don’t have anything to do with that sort of business, but at one point, my mother had rented a safety deposit box in a bank, and I had the box right next to it. So in my box, for which she had the key, she would put things that belonged to her. She would rehearse me on what was in there, and what I was supposed to do. But I would make fun of it all, and one day I said, ‘What happens if I die first? My deposit box will be blocked and you won’t be able to get your things out of it.’ She turned to my husband and said, ‘If Ingrid should have an accident, you must let me know immediately so I can go to the bank.’ And my husband said to himself, ‘Is this mother really telling me that her first reaction on hearing her daughter has died would be to go to the bank and open the deposit box?!’ So, it’s very surreal. Of course, if that were to happen, I’m sure she would not have reacted that way, but just the fact that she imagined doing it, is striking.

There’s a disregard for rules. I attribute it to the fact that Belgium became independent very late, so people don’t feel as much allegiance to Belgium as a governmental power, as people in the Netherlands or France might do. Food is another example. By and large, the food is better in Belgium than in the Netherlands because Belgium was the battleground of Europe for so long, if you have some money and you have a good meal, they can’t take that away from you.

I have friends who were building a house, but they discovered that if you had a top floor that was not yet accessible by a staircase, you didn’t have to pay the extra value-added tax for that top floor because it was clearly not inhabitable. They had small children who had their bedrooms up there, but money was a bit tight and they couldn’t pay the taxes, so they decided they were not going to have a staircase. They had this ladder, which they pulled up when it was not in use. But because their children were small, of course, they had to put a lot of security measures in place. They had a trap door and so on to make sure it was safe. And they would do this every evening, pull up this ladder, rather than just pay the VAT! They postponed having to pay it and did it later. I mean, that’s a surreal Belgian situation. It’s amazing. I can’t imagine it happening in England, but in Belgium people thought, ‘That’s ingenious!’.

I have a friend who says the Belgians fall somewhere between Germanic and the Latin culture, with the worst of both worlds, because they like to regulate, that’s the Germanic side, but then they have the complete Latin disregard for all regulations!

What are your favourite shops in Belgium/Brussels?

My favourite shops are very small and idiosyncratic. There was a little potter’s shop downtown but they liked sunnier climes so they moved to Spain. She exhibited and had a few designs that became trade objects for big commercial firms, as well as pieces that were artworks. So we bought a couple of those and were very happy with them.

I love walking through Brussels and discovering funky stores. I’m so sorry that many of the art stores around the southern point of Sablon and up to the Mont des Arts have closed now. They each had their own specialties. One had lots of Delft, one had Art Nouveau and so on. They were not quite as fancy as the galleries on the other side, closer to the Palais de Justice. So I’m sorry to see those stores go. I love going behind the Grand Place, in the neighbourhood where they have African stores but I think they might be waning too now and you can find some of that stuff online; on the other hand, that could be nice too in the sense that the people who have those websites are perhaps closer to Africa so it benefits African people more.

Your favourite Belgian/Brussels specialties?  

I love going to a good cheese store. I have places where I can find good cheese here in the States, but a proper cheese store! Or pastries. I love both the little neighbourhood patisseries where they have one or two things that they do superbly well, as well as the fancy pastry shops like Wittamer.

I don’t particularly like the waffle stands you have everywhere because I don’t think they’re very authentic. There used to be old Liège waffles which I liked, but now it doesn’t appeal to me. Also, people here in the States ask me constantly, what is a true Belgian waffle? Except there’s no such thing: there’s a Brussels waffle and a Liège waffle and the waffles that my grandmothers made. There are zillions of different waffles! And there was a tradition, especially on New Year’s Day, when people would come by and you’d give them waffles. Both my grandmothers made waffles, completely different ones. My mother would tell the story of her grandmother who made waffles on an iron that you heat in the fire, and there were yeast waffles, like in Brussels. But my other grandmother came from the Borinage and she made a sugary waffle that you could keep for a long time. We would take them home in a tin, whereas the Brussels waffles you eat fresh.

Do you have a personal wish linked to Brussels?

I hope to come back on a regular basis and be healthy enough to keep doing that. I hope it continues to become more vibrant and prosperous. We’ve been talking about the way Belgians get around regulations and so on, but I think it’s also linked in some way to a type of tolerance. Yes, there can be intolerant attitudes and we can all cite examples, but generally speaking, this way of getting around regulations means that you accept that things don’t have to be the way that somebody dictates to them to you. And that can sometimes be very positive and I like that a lot. In Flemish, they have the word ‘plantrekker’, for Belgians, people who find a way around things, who find a solution, a way to make things work. Finding ways to make things work can be a very good thing. Recently, because of my mother’s health problems, a friend bought me a book by Tom Lanoye called, ‘Speechless’ (Spraakeloos) in which he talks about his mother who was an amateur actress who loved language but lost her speech through a stroke. The whole book is an incredible story about growing up in a Flemish city. It was so wonderful and Belgian; so accepting of all the ways in which people can have their quirks and be different. That is something that I do miss. I’m not saying people aren’t tolerant in the States, but there’s a way, a Belgian way, that resonates with me and I hope to keep experiencing it. I will buy many more of his books.

Read another portrait: Tim Grosvenor

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To construct its ranking, AirHelp evaluated airports according to three weighted criteria: first, flight punctuality (60% of the final score); second, the quality of the airport’s customer service and cleanliness (20%); and third, the quality of the airport’s catering and shopping services (20%).

Brussels Airport fares poorly because of lack of punctuality

Brussels Airport’s disappointing performance was primarily due to its poor punctuality score of 6.2/10. (AirHelp’s rating methodology specifies that a flight is punctual when it takes off within 15 minutes of the stated departure time and lands within 15 minutes of the scheduled time of arrival.) This result represents a significant decline compared to last year’s score of 7.2/10.

On the other hand, Brussels Airport’s customer service and cleanliness score actually improved relative to last year (7.8/10 vs 7.4/10), as did its score for its catering and shopping services (7.7/10 vs 6.9/10).

As for Charleroi Airport, its overall ranked position of 15th represents a significant improvement compared to its performance last year, when it finished in 96th place. (141 airports were analyzed in 2018, compared to 132 this year.)

Doha’s Hamad International Airport, Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, and Athens International Airport make up the top three airports in this year’s ranking, while Lisbon Airport finished bottom.

The post Brussels Airport near the bottom and Charleroi Airport near the top of new global airport ranking appeared first on Brussels Express.

Brussels is Europe’s fifth most expensive capital city in terms of construction costs, according to a recent report by the consulting company Arcadis.

The study, entitled “International Construction Costs 2019”, found that the four priciest European capitals to build in are Copenhagen, London, Moscow and Paris, while at a global level construction is most expensive in New York, San Francisco and Hong Kong. The ten cheapest cities for construction worldwide, on the other hand, are almost all in Asia.

In Belgium, a rise of 2.5% in the average cost of construction is expected for 2019 relative to 2018, according to Arcadis.

The post Brussels is Europe’s fifth most expensive capital city in terms of construction costs appeared first on Brussels Express.

Nationality: British Madagascan

Occupation: Artist, gallery owner and restaurateur.

‘I was writing a letter at a pub, and somebody came up with a little sketch of me, and said, « There’s someone who’d like to paint you!« ‘

Every week, Brussels Express meets individuals connected to the city through work, life or play, building a picture of the community of 184 nationalities who help to make Brussels what it is. It’s fitting that our very first ‘portrait’ is with Tim Grosvenor – artist, restaurateur and owner of Gallery 151 in Ixelles – who shares his journey and gives us his take on Brussels life.

Can you give us a brief introduction to your journey? Where do you come from?

My birth right is British Madagascan. My father was a missionary out there for about 18 years. I’m a classic example of someone who is detached from his birth nationality and when I first went to school in the UK, I felt like an alien. I’ve lived longer outside the UK than inside. What I really feel is European. I feel like a citizen of the world. Theresa May would call people like me a ‘citizen of nowhere‘ but I feel like a citizen of everywhere. I’m very attached to Brussels now; I feel so at home here, because Brussels is full of people like me, trying to make their home. Anybody can make it theirs. The Belgians seem very modest about that. I’ve never encountered any nativism here.

I studied Fine Art for five years including History of Art and then I had a long career in policy research. I ran a company in London, oriented around public transport, mobility and social exclusion, criminology – a raft of issues to do with public policy. I did a huge study on confidence in the criminal justice system in the UK. We talked to convicted criminals, police, prison officers, judges, victims and they all said, the jury system because the jury doesn’t really have an angle. You’re judged by your peers. I presented to a sharp-suited bunch of policy-makers and civil servants and said the key thing that establishes confidence is the jury system. They wanted to cut costs by not having a jury, so it wasn’t what they wanted to hear. 

To tell the truth, I had imposter syndrome for about 25 years, where I thought a spotlight would suddenly shine on me and show me up as a fraud. I also don’t like labels and if I get stuck in one thing, I want to shift into another. While working, I kept trying to find a creative outlet and did quite a lot of writing, looking for somewhere I could go where I wasn’t just working for a client.

Then I had a strange experience. I was in the UK near the Tate, writing a letter at a pub, and somebody came up with a little sketch of me, and said, ‘There’s someone who’d like to paint you!’ I was amazed. It was a guy called Michael Reynolds who was a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters – and I thought it was a sign that I should go back into the art world. He came to France and painted my portrait. So, I slowly got back into art. It was the opposite of what people say about riding a bike. It was like climbing up a cliff face. It’s not just about lack of practice; visual art is not like playing a violin. It’s about context and choices. You have to find what you want to express. I’d just got to the point where I was doing an exhibition in Switzerland and I did a piece and thought the whole of my life has culminated in this moment: it made sense to me. And then, just then, there was personal drama. I split up with the mother of my children and the eureka moment was trampled by the fallout of all that.

But actually, art is an iterative process. I’m not so interested in the individual pieces. I’m interested in the journey. I mean even Michelangelo was considered an artisan. The image of Van Gogh epitomises what most people think of as the modern idea of an artist but he’s a rarity in the visual arts – it’s about being craftsperson and honing your craft.

Why Brussels? And what were your first impressions? 

I didn’t actually choose Brussels. I was living in Switzerland and my ex-partner found a job in Brussels and I didn’t want to be separated from my kids, so I moved here, which was fine. I didn’t like Zurich at all. It felt moribund. You need so much money to make an impact there, whereas in Brussels it felt like you could do something. 

What were the most difficult aspects in terms of daily life when you arrived?

I had no network and was on my own with the children for half the time. I knew nobody and was ‘old’ and had no job, so no colleagues. But I’d had a gallery before in France and so I opened the gallery at 151 Chaussée de Wavre. People said I should be in the Tanneurs district, but I like Matongé and for a long time I’d lived around Notting Hill Gate and Portobello Road in London and in a way Matongé reminded me of what that used to be like. The character of Ixelles is changing – the works on Chaussée d’Ixelles for example, but it needed it. I hope it doesn’t change too much though. Near the commune, this young guy has opened a bar. Green tiling. Very low key, and they’ve left the old décor. It’s cool. If you did that in London, you’d have to have a bank behind you.

Do you gravitate towards people of similar culture to yours or are you more often with Belgians, Brussels residents?

Some expats constantly harp on about what they miss but you can get everything here in Brussels and I’m engaged with being here. I travel but I consider this my home. When I lived in France, my idea of hell was to spend Sundays drinking pink gins with other Brits and no French at all. Wherever I’m living I want to make that place home. Anyway, there’s not enough time to be homesick. I gravitate to anyone who’s interesting in any way. I’m anti the notion of nations and what appeals to me about Belgium is it seems one of the most modest nations. There’s a global joke about it being difficult to ‘name ten famous Belgians’ and the Belgians just shrug their shoulders, even though they have huge achievements. I’m scared of nationalism because you never know where it ends. I like Belgium, and especially Brussels, because whether you’re Belgian, Slovenian, Portuguese, whatever . . . you can belong. So, I gravitate to people who like Brussels. I think it’s a cool city, I really do, and the more I see, the more I like it.

If you were mayor of one of the 19 Brussels communes or if you were Minister-President of the Brussels-Capital Region, what would you do as your first action? 

My first action would be bins or pavements. I love Brussels but I do think the state of the pavements is barbaric. It’s the capital of Europe and yet you see these works sites and pavements with chaotic barriers and rubble in the street and huge chunks of metal sticking out of the ground. How are people with partial sight, for example, or a wheelchair supposed to get around? As I said, I used to work a lot on mobility. There was a project called ‘Civilising Cities‘ about what you could do to make a city reach maturity as a civilised space. If you want to improve the quality of people’s lives, start with their front doorstep. Your own private world is one thing, but if you walk through the door you want something that is conducive to all forms of mobility.

What has your attention in the news at the moment?

I suppose Brexit to an extent. I am very much a European and I am sad about Brexit. In the UK, urban areas were in general more positive towards Europe in the referendum that suburban areas. Cities tend to make people more open-minded. That is my belief anyway and it’s another reason why I like urban areas, because in large conurbations it’s very mixed and you simply have to get on with your neighbours. It was areas without much immigration that voted strongly for Brexit and that worries me.  

What are your favourite shops in Belgium/Brussels?

Schleiper on Charleroi. It’s the best art shop I have ever been to. It’s utterly unbelievable. I’ve taken other artists there. For a city to have an art shop of that calibre is amazing. The choice is breath–taking. I don’t think even in London or New York there’s anything that matches it. You can get stuff that artists dream of. Every brand and colour of paint, and materials you’ve never even heard of. 

And your favourite Belgian/Brussels specialties?  

It’s got to be chocolate. Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate any day. I’ve lived in two countries specialised in chocolate: Switzerland and Belgium. But the Belgian dark chocolate really does it for me.

Your favourite places or memories in Brussels? 

The Ixelles lakes because I used to sit there with my new partner in the early days in Brussels and we’d drink wine, and I used to feel like I was on holiday. Also, when my son Jonathan was born in Brussels on a beautiful April day nearly a year ago – at the new Delta hospital.

Do you have a personal wish linked to Brussels? 

I hope that Brussels doesn’t lose its charm through too much money. You can’t stand too much in the way of progress and I like progress, but I hope Brussels doesn’t lose its rough and ready charm. When I first moved to London, it was quite grungy and not the slick city it is now, and the London underground was accused of being shambolically filthy. It’s a hard thing to get right. To keep soul and have change is tough, wherever you go. Opposite our gallery, there’s a café called La Marraine run by Jacqui, who is the like the godmother of the whole neighbourhood. The guys sit outside drinking coffee and there’s African TV at full volume and if Brussels lost that, I’d be sad, and a lot of cities do. What happens is people think: ‘This is a cool place and I’d like to live here, but only if there’s a little baker there and a deli there…’ and it gradually pushes out the other businesses. But it goes in cycles, like in Detroit, which suffered the catastrophic destruction of the collapse and then the artists come and fill the vacuum. I don’t know of many city planners who can get it right. But, in Brussels, because of the politics here, they actually do try and create a mix. And if you’ve got public housing in inner city areas, which is want you need, what used to be called council houses, you can keep people who couldn’t afford private sector rents and Brussels is still very mixed thanks to that. 

Tim will be hosting, ‘Looking Out’ – an exhibition by Dominique Rebibo – at Gallery 151, Chaussée de Wavre, from 28 March  – 28 May 2019.

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On Thursday 28 February and Friday 1 March 2019, international association professionals will meet for the European Association Summit. It will be held in Brussels, Europe’s top conference city. The theme of the EAS this year is share and co-create.

The annual European Association Summit should not be missed by anyone involved with international associations. It is the perfect opportunity to network and share experiences. The programme for this seventh edition includes around forty speakers from a diverse range of organisations.

Brussels

The EAS will be held in Square, Brussels Convention Centre. Participants will then transfer to the Ateliers des Tanneurs for the networking event. It is no coincidence that Brussels has been chosen to host this event. Indeed, the region is home to around 2250 international associations. Furthermore, Brussels is Europe’s top destination when it comes to organising congresses funded by international associations.

Share and co-create

This year, with its theme ‘share and co-create’, the EAS aims to focus people’s attention on new trends in the sector. All participants will get the chance to find out more about ‘best practices’ and develop a strong international network to help them with new initiatives.

Thanks to the interactive workshops, representatives from around 100 international organisations will be able to share their experiences. Such co-creation helps in developing new tools and new daily methods. Participants learn plenty in a lively environment, while remaining focused on finding solutions within the world of international associations itself. In fact, EAS has never deviated from this principle.

Sustainability

This year, there will be extra focus on the environment. The EAS participants will therefore find out how to make an event environmentally friendly and what associations can do to promote sustainability. Each association can also calculate its carbon emission level and compensate this with a donation to Sun For Schools, a Brussels project that aims to make schools aware of the environmental challenges ahead. Naturally, the visit.brussels Association Bureau also aims to make this edition of the EAS a sustainable one.

For this reason, a plan has been drafted in which all stakeholders will be encouraged to commit to sustainability using specific KPIs. In this way, other conferences in Brussels can follow the example set by the EAS.

The topics planned for the EAS include crisis management and digitisation, a vision on the non-profit sector and young people in associations. Thanks to the attendance of speakers from other continents, experiences of organisations from the US, Middle East and Asia will also be covered.

Breakout sessions

Topics:
• The New Generation will be our Future Leadership
• Managing Change, Transformation and Emergencies
• Vision and Mission for Non-Profit-Organizations
• How to Attract, Engage and Retain Association Members
• Be a Green Association: Challenges of Sustainable Associations Today

Partner sessions

Topics:
• The ESAE session: Digital ®evolution in your Association: Embrace. Engage. Excel.
• How ICCA uses trust to build a community!

The EAS is organised in close collaboration with some large partners from the sector: ESAE (European Society of Association Executives), FAIB (Federation of European & International Associations Based in Belgium), UIA (Union of International Associations) and GAHP (Global Association Hubs Partnership), the Solvay Brussels School – Economics & Management, PCMA (Professional Convention Management Association) and the ICCA (International Congress and Convention Association).

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A charity dinner was held simultaneously in three restaurants in Brussels on February 16th at 20:00.

The three restaurants are: BON BON, BOZAR & LE CHALET DE LA FORÊT.

• BON BON (345, avenue de Tervuren 1150) Brussels by Christophe Hardiquest with Margot Janse and

Maksut Askar (Neolokal, Istanbul)

Manu Buffara (Manu, Curitiba / LA50BR, One to watch award 2018)

Willem Hiele (Willem Hiele, Coxyde)

Chiho Kanzaki (Virtus, Paris)

Alain Passard (L’Arpège***, Paris / n°8 W50BR)

Ana Ros (Hisa Franko, Kobarid / n°48 W50BR, World’s Best Female Chef 2017)

• BOZAR ( 3, rue Baron Horta, 1000 Brussels) by Karen Torosyan with Margot Janse and

Isabelle Arpin (Isabelle Arpin, Brussels)

Pascale Barbot ( l’Astrance***, Paris)

Emma Bengtsson (Aquavit***, New-York)

Sang-Hoon Degeimbre (l’Air du temps***, Liernu)

David Martin (La Paix***, Brussels)

Christope Pelé (Le clarence***, Paris)

Heinz Reitbauer (Steirereck**, Vienna/ n14 W50BR)

• LE CHALET DE LA FORÊT (43, Dreve de Lorraine, 1180 Brussels) by Pascal Devalkeneer with Margot Janse and

Joris Bijdendijk (Rijks*, Amsterdam)

May Chow (Little Bao, Hong Kong / Asian Best Femal Chef 2017)

Mauro Colagreco (Mirazur**, Menton / n°3 W50BR)

Rodolfo Guzman (Borago, Santiago / n°27 W50BR)

JP McMahon (Aniar*, Galway)

Virgilio Martinez (Central, Lima / n°6 W50BR)

Pia Léon (Kjolle, Lima / South America Best Femal Chef 2018)

Viljhjalmur Sigurdarson (Souvenir, Gent)

& Margot Janse

 » Because no one can learn on an empty stomach « 

The ten-course menu costs, 320 euros with drinks included, and all the profits will be donated to the association created in 2009 by the Dutch chef Margot Janse.

« Feeding Hungry Minds »,  provides meals five days a week to 1,500 underprivileged children in Franschhoek.

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