Within the expanding and mutating city of Brussels, there exists a derelict piece of land, a friche that is contested by humans in the midst of a pressing housing shortage. The friche once operated as a marshalling yard but discontinued its operations in 1994. Owing to a lack of human appropriation and a lapse in policy making, this yard began to rewild itself, becoming a safe haven for non-human inhabitants. Development authorities found themselves at odds with locals and ecologists who advocated for the emergent landscape to be left to its own devices, eventually leaving the friche in a state of limbo and uncertainty.

And with this passage of time, a heterotopia was born.

The heterotopia is a counter space in the city, removed from traditional time and place, that demands a rite of passage and that, which begets several places at once.

As an ode to this last, heterotopic green in Brussels, this project becomes a balancing act and mediator between the friche and the city : a border of collective housing, an “alt"(ernate) house/community space and a bathhouse that would be nestled and hidden within these borders.

The bathhouse intends to serve as a vessel for the purification of the being (human and non
human) as one transitions from the surrounding city into the haven of the heterotopic friche,
purged from the weights of regular life and time. The “bathhouse of enchantments” is therefore, a physical and metaphorical place where not only people but also other migratory guests of the friche come to rest their weary minds and bodies. It is not only a spiritual vessel of wellness, but also performs a social function of synergizing communities and rekindling an intimate relationship with the nature of the friche that is so far missing.
In addition to this, the proposal also becomes a water collection and management system for the east side of the friche, where it can initiate and facilitate the growth of a constructed wetland as a habitat and resting place for the growing species of migratory birds, bees, dragonflies and others.
The design unravels in layers and tales - from the urban-ness of the housing, to the transitory nature of the collective alt-house and finally, to the heterotopia of the bathhouse and its temporal gardens. It narrates the complete journey of moving through the city, into a sublime and magical realm. Time becomes the essence of the project, where the bathhouse and alt-house shape shift, appear and disappear with a play of time on three scales - daily, seasonal and longue durée.

The proposed intervention perhaps serves as a precedent - a newfound narrative of brownfield and post-industrial plot development, which are so often the “last greens” in town. Peeling and delayering, dissecting and revealing the “as found”, it embraces the need for the heterotopia and its virtues in the city, which would otherwise be obscured in the tenacious and expanding urban realm.

The flaneur is a figure of perception and an embodiment of liberation in the metropolis - an uninhibited spectator of the city, seeking the pleasures of its indulgent atmospheres and basking in the vibrancy of its unfolding urban life. However, this simple, cognitive engagement with the urban realm is reserved for male authorship, where the basic human requirements of time, space and leisure are gendered. The male flaneur defies the scrutiny of the public gaze, unperturbed by the fears of assault and societal convention while enjoying the luxuries of idleness in the midst of a bustling street. On the contrary, the female flaneur is obscured, her space and time in the city compromised at the behest of patriarchal constructs. Where is her space in the city? How does she reclaim her ownership of the urban scape?
Moved by the question of female flanerie in the metropolis, this essay delves into the idiosyncratic realm of the kotha - a spatial typology that emerged in the Indian subcontinent during the Mughal rule around the 16th Century. The kotha was similar to a salon, where women (known as tawaifs or salon ladies) adept in the arts of dance and music, would perform for elite and royal male patrons. Being a dedicated space of performance embedded in the city’s fabric, the kotha oscillated between the public and private realms, never fully belonging to either. Through the changing socio-political condition of India across its colonial, post colonial and contemporary eras, the kotha, just like the metropolis, has undergone a shift in identity and spatial expression - thereby mirroring the condition of the female flaneur, now embodied by the tawaif. Interestingly, the kotha has time and again been a subject of interest in South Asian visual media culture, particularly represented through its cinematic space.
Therefore, tapping into my own fascination for South Asian cinema and drawing on the spatio-corporeal realm of the kotha as a specific case, this paper seeks to unearth the greater question of women’s space in the city - their modalities of expression, their reclamation of citizenship and above all, their personification of the flaneur - a figure of perception and an embodiment of liberation in the metropolis.