Friday 16.03 > Sunday 20.05.2012, BOZAR, Brussels

What will Brussels be like in 2040 if its demographic growth continues? How will people get around the city if the motor car is no longer a sustainable means of transport? How can we reduce the social divide and avoid a dual city? How can we offer everyone an opportunity to live and work in the city with dignity? How can we coordinate the development of Brussels with its hinterland?

Faced with all these questions, the Brussels-Capital Region turned to three teams of international experts, made up of architects, town planners, and landscape architects, among others. The Brussels 2040: Three Visions for a Metropolis exhibition shows the approaches taken by these three teams via videos, models, photographs, and urban master plans. Bureau Bas Smets forms part of one of these teams. In We can change the weather (2010) Bas Smets already showed us how the site of Tour & Taxis could be reconverted to a major public park, giving the opportunity to reveal the lost valley of the Senne River.

Serge Gutwirth, Ronald Leenes, Paul De Hert, Yves
Poullet (Eds.), Springer, 2012

After a period in which internet became our major channel of information and communication, internet infrastructure is used more and more for data storing and processing. Cloud computing is replacing local devices and servers with as direct consequence more flexibility, scalability and accessibility.

Yet cloud computing complicates the privacy and data protection landscape. And what is more, there is an unprecedented increase in tracking, monitoring and surveillance apps. Not only used to monitor bad behaviors but even more so to detect correlations and opportunities for those who have access and intentions good or bad. In that sense, innocent until proven guilty tends to become guilty until proven innocent.

Another issue, in the domain of commerce, is that internet users take the free services offered through the internet for granted not realizing that if you do not pay for a service, you are not really a customer, rather the product that is being sold…

These are just a few topics that are fundamental in the domain of surveillance, profiling, regulations, security and the concepts that make out the subject of the CPDP-conferences and the core research of Serge Gutwirth and Paul De Hert (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Ronald Leenes (Tilburg University) and Yves Poullet (Université de Namur).