Water as a Common Good in Brussels

original article published in: Bridges over troubled waters, Crosstalks, VUB press, Brussels 2012, p223-231- "L'eau comme bien commun à Bruxelles", Dominique Nalpas & François Lebecq

The era in which we are living seems to leave us ever more fasci­nated with technology, this great human endeavor that has the power to free us from the yoke of nature or that makes human beings an extension of the creator. And yet, with water, we seem to maintain an astonishing relationship: we project on water a desire, an ideal of purity and natural virginity far removed from technical complications and other social contamination. We could be tempted to say, “Cover these impure waters so that we may not see them,” to paraphrase the famous repost of Tartuffe to Dorine. In reality, the clear, pure water that apparently arrives so naturally and drinkable in the heart of the city only comes at the cost of increasingly sophisticated and expensive technology. Water is a hairy1 object that is tightly woven into social, environmental, economic, and political complexity.

In fact, water has been invisible in our city for a long time. It is a black stain on our urban development policy, repulsed by our imaginations and our concerns as citizens. And like many other elements that we don’t want to see realistically, it risks resurfacing, like the return of the repulsed, to manifest itself ever more painfully from crisis to crisis. Which is why the headlong rush towards more technology – in the name of progress – resolves some questions while posing more, and never exhausts the need to render the management of this precious resource more visible and more conscious, therefore more collective, more common... Let’s say it another way: technology and society can only exist in a complex combination of integrated interdependence. Water, like climate, is a fact of nature, but also a social, economic and political fact that merits better understanding if we wish to keep it as a common good.

Water's revenge

EGEB, PUM and other water brigands will never miss an opportunity to prove that it makes no sense putting all water in the city underground. Now water itself seems to reclaim its place in the city.

Below excerpts of some news­paper articles.