Centralization, decentralization, and metropolization: cultural attractors in Brussels metropolitan area

In our on-going thesis, “cultural attractors and mobility in Brussels metropolitan region”, we investigate the role of cultural infrastructures in the structuration and formalization of the metropolitan landscape. The research aims to contribute to an in-depth debate across research fields regarding the relationship between culture and city, by focusing on the architectural and urban expression of the places of cultural diffusion and on the evolving rationalities that saw to their implementation. A specific focus is put in our research on mobility, and its influence on the territorialization of cultural infrastructures. Indeed, their accessibility defines more often than not their ability to be spaces of convergence and to contribute to construct the cultural, social and public aspects of the metropolis. Analysing the accessibility of cultural infrastructures, and its evolution, thus prove to be revealing of their embedded rationalities. With this mind-set, we would like to question in this paper the presence, accessibility and localization of cultural infrastructures—which can be seen as (a small) part of a territory’s cultural capital—of the Horizontal Metropolis and the challenges it faces.