Before I begin this paper, I want to start with the inspiration for writing it.

My submission titled the

Production of Precarity in Brussels was motivated by my experiences in academia within the city. While
taking part in multiple excursions and courses during the semester, what became clear was the
existence of the poor crescent populated by Moroccan and Turkish migrants. So for those of you that
have not been to Brussels, Brussels city has a main ring road shaped like an upside down pentagon.
Along the edge of the pentagon is what is known as the poor crescent or the poor croissant. What
professors and researchers did not mention during my semester there were the words racial
segregation, exclusion, and marginality in the context of race or ethnicity. Within the purview of urban
studies a central aim is to move discourses and analyses closer to more accurately assessing the shape
and nature of a space. However, what is frequently obscured within academia or even the city at large in
Brussels are issues of intensified precarity surrounding residents in deprived neighborhoods due to
exclusion based on one's ethnic background. In my paper I attempt to give the precarity faced within
the poor crescent a shape and narrative. And perhaps my aim is more personal and an attempt to
validate the pain and suffering these residents to a whiter, more accredited audience. Put another way:
Everything people of color must endure, our sensational pain and our sensational brilliance, must be
accessible to white people. We this experienced when Judith Butler wrote her book Precarious Lives,
finally informing us that lives lost in the post 9/11 counter terrorist measures taken by the United States
were worth rethinking and grieving , but who will again allow us to give voice to our grief in the current
state of affairs?
Introduction
As we know globalization and the neoliberal economic regime of reducing government regulation,
privatization, and rule of free enterprise that has persisted since the 1970's have transformed the
world's socioeconomic landscape. This landscape involves a complex system of production and social
relations. However, these systems around the world are increasingly nuanced and differ widely from
each other. Frequently resulting from this phenomena is a process of uneven development that creates
new and reproduces old inequalities.
The Poor Croissant
Within Brussels exists what is locally known as the 'poor croissant' or in academic literature the 'poor
crescent'. The neighborhoods that make up the crescent as I have mentioned line the pentagon shaped
ring road are composed of Saint Josse, Molenbeek, Anderlecht, and Saint Gilles. Before the active
recruitment of foreign labor in the 1960s, these neighborhoods housed working class Belgians. During
the mid nineteenth century labor came to Brussels and were drawn by industrial revolution. Many of
said working class Belgians could only live in what was then the periphery of the city, the ring road. So
this area of the city has been vulnerable to radical transformation and housing insecurity. To illustrate
this point: during the latter half of the nineteenth century King Leopold II had decided to follow in
Haussmann's footsteps in Paris through the creation of wider boulevards and grand parks. His
reinvention of Brussels disrupted and destroyed spaces to make way for his visions of monumental
landscapes and architecture. Even today the building Palais du Justice is remembered for displacing
Dutch workers and scarring the neighborhood of Marolles. Particular to these neighborhoods has been

the consistent production and reproduction of these spaces as a place for the city's most vulnerable
work force.
History of the Poor Crescent
Currently, these neighborhoods possess the highest concentrations of North Africans as well as Turkish
residents with a migrant background. Many of the residents of foreign national descent draw their roots
from migration in the mid 1960's. At the end of World War II Belgium's coal production had declined;
one reason for decline was the lack of domestic labor that could be sourced due to poor working
conditions and low pay. Because coal production was closely tied to the production of other industries in
Belgium the government began actively pursuing foreign, low skilled labor. In the late 1960's many
workers came from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The migrant labor that was recruited from Turkey and
Morocco were frequently sourced from the country side and over all had low levels of education
(Mazzocchetti 2012). This new migrant minority settled in areas previously occupied by the Belgian
working class. For it was also at this time that that the working class Belgians began moving to the
periphery of the city into the suburbs through grants and subsidies. This meant that their relatively low
quality homes became homes for the immigrant labor continuing the place's legacy of housing low paid
and low skilled labor (Manco 2005).
Before the economic crash in the 1970s Brussels was the nation's primary industrial city with 158,000
jobs in the manufacturing sector (Vandermotten). In an attempt to fuel the growth of its industrial core,
Belgium relaxed its immigration policies and even went so far as to remove the requirement for
workers to obtain a preliminary work permit before coming. This enabled foreign workers to arrive as
tourists and gain the work status once in Belgium(Martiniello 2003). However, economic crisis struck
along with a decline in industry. (In 2009 only 38,000 manufacturing jobs remain in Brussels.)
During the 1970s the coal mining industry began to die and coupled with the global economic crash
during this period, the new migrants labor became extremely superfluous. Belgium along with the rest
of the rest of the world suffered massive unemployment. The new Muslim communities in these
neighborhoods were seen as competition for employment and even social services with the Belgians
who did not have the capital to move the suburbs (Manco 2005).
Migration and Precarity
The residents in these neighborhoods experienced a sudden and increased precarity. Although the term
precarity came to popular use as a means to organize around against the economic insecurity and
growing austerity in the early mid 2000s, workers such as women and peoples from the global south
feasibly have always experienced an insecure labor market and did not experience the benefits of first
world Keynesian economics (Paret 2016). The history or state of precarity perhaps then extends far
beyond that of its first use as a political tool when considering that the global labor force is fractured
and discriminated against according to varying identities of ethnicity, gender, and age.
The conclusion one might draw from the separate experiences between workers in the global north
and the global south is a divergent experience of precariousness during the Fordist period.

The Belgian government searched for precarious labor during the period of recruitment of migrant
workers. Their aim was to actually find those whose labor was more precarious than Belgian workers
because their pay and conditions could be more easily exploited at a cheaper cost perhaps to benefit the
larger industries within the country. Therefore perhaps the Turkish and Moroccan migrants were
already a part of the precariat, "a hirable on demand, available on call, exploitable at will, and firable at
whim' since labor migration is driven by the 'demand for a cheap and disposable reserve army of labor
in an advanced capitalist economy'(Schierup 2013). However, once in Belgium what enabled the
continuance and perhaps an added intensity to their vulnerability was not just the history of
geographical uneven development, but also their cultural and ethnic difference between themselves
and Belgians in Brussels.
Precarity: The Intersection of Migration and Cultural Difference
Encompassed within this Muslim population's status as migrants is the facet of their cultural difference
especially as migrants with a visibly different religious heritage than local Belgians. During the late
1970's and early 1980's this difference was used to incite anti-Muslim rhetoric within Brussels as well as
around the world. Sunaina Maira argues that on the global scale various academic literature and media
view the OPEC oil crisis as an important historical site in the narrative of Islamaphobia that draws its
roots in the history colonialism. The phenomena of 'othering' and rejection of the new Muslim
community in Brussels correlates with increased competition for employment and perceived
competition for public services caused by the larger global crisis. By expanding the historical geography
of Islamophobia during this period perhaps the increase of Islamaphobic rhetoric that arose in Brussels
might be seen as part of a larger historical narrative tradition of the west 'orientalising' and
subordinating cultures and peoples outside of the occident. This 'othering' of the Muslim community
Sherene Razack argues exhibits itself as Muslims being ostracized from the political community, enabling
a state of exception that has legitimized their discrimination, collective castigation, and dehumanization
especially in context the war on terror, which arguably has been the case for Brussels.
The height of the Islamaphobic sentiment after the decline of the coal industry and economic crisis is
best illustrated by the policies and behavior of Richard Nols, a town councilor and then mayor of the
neighborhood of Schaerbeek from 1970-1989. 'It would not be exaggerating to say that during this
period Schaerbeek's Muslims experienced a situation of quasi apartheid' (Manco 2005). Starting in the
1980s Muslims were made the subject of discriminatory policies and racist, alarmist debates (Manco
2005). Within Brussels right leaning politicians began to essentialize the Muslim identity as negative and
dangerous to the cultural make up of the Belgian community. Richard Nols even went so far in a 1986
election campaign to dress in traditional Moroccan clothing, ride a camel, and scream,
In 20 years all of Schaerbeek will look like this unless you vote for me (Rubin 2016). Immigration was
Nols' platform for election which was further buttressed by the economic crisis and he was able to hold
local office for two decades (Manco 2005).

Exclusion and Marginalization

Ramon Grosfoguel and Eric Mielants create a means for framing the dialog on Islamophobia. Richard
Nols' act of dressing and riding around on a camel, discriminatory policies, and blatant racism within the
categories they've established should be considered a form of cultural racism. Cultural racism as defined
by Grosfoguel and Mielants does not engage in naming a biological race, rather framing habits,
behaviors, and beliefs as inferior. The new wave of cultural racism in the past 60 years has been a result
of the decline of racism based on biology after World War II with the defeat of the Nazi regime.
However, the targets of this mode of Islamophobia are those who might be considered the 'usual
suspects' i.e. the 'traditional colonial subjects' (Grosfoguel 2006).
By making this community an exception through Islamophobic cultural racism, Richard Nols in
Schaerbeek along with other local policy makers in Brussels made those in the Muslim community more
vulnerable to discrimination and exclusion from employment, housing mobility, and as well as access to
a better education.
In 1981 one could argue that local authorities legalized the creation of ghettos when a ban was put on
registering foreigners in the public registry that would make it impossible for people to move to
different homes or apply for family reunification.
Precaritization of Life
The state of exceptionalism created around the Muslim community not only affected their labor but also
their lives. Maribel Casas Cortes of the feminist collective, Precarias a la Deriva, expands on the term of
percarity by extending the term to the holistic conception of an individual's life. The conditions of any
given human life is the result of social production. This social production argues Cortes has been
completely infiltrated and consumed by capitalist production. Precarity cannot be reduced to solely
applying the public sphere of production, it penetrates the private as well and makes access to
resources for a well life uncertain. Precarias a la Deriva make an important pivot within the movement
from precarity concerning labor to the 'precarization of life'.
The modality of precarity of Muslim communities within Brussels, seems to result from multiple
intersections of structural inequalities pertaining to their status as working class and as Muslim migrants
from outside of Europe. However, this precarity that has been embedded in the production life appears
to have also extended to their private lives as well as to the lives of their children.
A Lineage of Precarity
The waves of migration in the 1970s not only changed the demographic composition of the work force
but in other spheres such as schools as well. In a studyi on scholastic inequality within Brussels, the data
appeared to demonstrate that social inequalities experienced by migrant workers continued and was
perpetuated through scholastic inequality experienced by their children (Jacobs 2007). Students with
mother's from North African and Congolese ethnic backgrounds appeared to as a trend opt for
vocational and technical schoolingii. The weight of a student's parents circumstances which in this case

encompasses racism, precarious labor conditions, and low income manifested itself in a student's ability
to make academic choices. In addition to this 'inherited precarity' of students with migrant parents,
there is also the continuing presence of racism and discrimination that has persisted to the present.
Calling for data from the same study, nearly half of the students with migrant parents have experienced
being called racist slurs and around 15% claimed to be the subject of racist actions (Jacobs 2007). The
study touched on points of xenophobia in which students with foreign born parents seemed to
subscribe to the notion that, Some Belgo-Belgians do not want people of foreign origin to become fulledged members of society, while Belgians without a migrant history ascribed to the notion that, To
be fully accepted by society, people of foreign origin must give up certain cultural practices. Despite the
fact that most of the students if not all students with migrant backgrounds were Belgian citizens, they
possessed a reduced sense of belonging and even safety despite their citizenship.
In addition to being marginalized within the larger school system as a result of Brussels' heritage of
ethnic discrimination, employment prospects for youth in these neighborhoods is also bleak. Not
surprisingly, many of the youths with migrant backgrounds living in the deprived neighborhoods of
Brussels graduate with little more than a secondary diploma. However, this becomes an issue in a time
when there is a deficit of available low skilled employment (Rea 2009). Furthermore, research from
Brussels Studies Institute revealed that 31.4% of employers admitted to discriminating against young
people of Moroccan origin in their hiring practices (Jacobs 2007). And perhaps most telling is that in
2007 17% of the working population with university degrees within these poor neighborhoods were
unemployed verses an 8% unemployment rate for the rest of the city. So the rampant racism has a clear
and material impact on the lives within these neighborhoods, and ultimately creates an added layer of
complexity in the conception of precarious lives.
However, as we see through the generations the precarity that affected the parents of today's youth has
changed in modality within the space of the city. The vulnerability of these youth does not come from
their status as migrants with little knowledge of their environment or a lack of citizenship rather it
stems from the social tensions within the city shaped by ethnicity, the global neoliberal economic
regime, and structural poverty.
Conclusion
Precarity in Brussels in the context of these neighborhoods has been produced and reproduced through
politics of exclusion and reinforced by existing structural inequalities. On a local level the problem
continues to reproduced through inequalities in education as well as superficial public policy making in
terms of revitalizing these neighborhoods. To address the issue of deprived neighborhoods Brussels uses
a neighborhood contract scheme meant to rehabilitate neighborhoods by creating parks and new public
spaces. However, these measures do nothing to improve education and employment opportunities that
remain a barrier to a fuller enjoyment of these communities' citizenship and ability to interact and
change the city.
On a regional level Brussels as the capitol of Europe might be considered a global city. It fulfills this
stereotype a polarized landscape between highly paid expat workers and low paid low skilled workers

catering to them in service industries. As the city makes space and way for the expats, the interests of
vulnerable while poor communities are obscured and ignored perpetuating an uneven development
within the city. What is clear is that the city as a whole has not reshaped itself to enable the Muslim
communities within these deprived neighborhoods to meaningfully mold the city to what David Harvey
refers to as their 'heart's desire' . Certain imprints exist such as the informal Moroccan markets, the
largest being the Sunday market at Gare du Midi, and shops have a marked presence in the city.
Perhaps their nature lends it to the kind of presence the Muslim community is allowed. These
temporary structures operate through a grey economy and come up then collapse within a day. They
have no indelible mark on the city; they are tenuous; they are precarious.
To return to the personal I want to illustrate the point with a personal experience, once I was on a tour
with an urban researcher in the neighborhood within the 'poor croissant' he commented, "Informal
markets are not Belgian" in addition to discouraging the tour group to buy their vegetables from the
Sunday market. His remark makes clear that they are not Belgians and the Muslim community and their
practices remain alien and indigestible to many Belgians. However, in order to disrupt this narrative of
exclusion and precarity requires reclaiming belonging and reimagining community. On the night of the
Paris attacks young, Belgian men died. Najim Laachraoui, one of the suicide bombers, was a young man
who had graduated with a degree in electrical engineering and was from the poor crescent. His life was
unlike that of his peers and he had the opportunity to pursue a secure work and home. And his death is
more than just the loss of one young man's life. Rather it demonstrates a deeper cry, a deeper message
of pain and anguish. Let us return to Judith Butler and her question, "What makes a grievable life," It is a
question that must posed in the city as it transforms again to position itself in the wake of increasing
violence within its borders. To grieve his life is to accept that there is something that the community
must grapple with, a pain and it is to see him as a product and a part of the city of Brussels. Perhaps by
acknowledging and grieving him, his life, his community, and his space can the invisible be made visible
and allow for a radical remaking of the city.

This was a quantitative study of secondary school pupils in French speaking schools in Brussels in March 2006. The
questionnaire concerned lifestyles, racism, and fears of crime. It was given to 646 students enrolled in thirteen of
the fourteen secondary schools in the French speaking network of Brussels' central borough that is known as
downtown Brussels. This sample was fairly representative of the students in this educational network, given that it
covered more than two-thirds of the students enrolled in the various forms of secondary education (general,
technical, vocational, and artistic) of the francophone schools led by the municipal government.
ii

The study found a strong correlation between ethnic background and level of education of mothers. The
mother's of ethnic backgrounds from North Africa and the Congo had relatively lower levels of education to
Belgian counterparts. Additionally, another strong correlation or relationship between data was between a
student's scholastic trajectory and their mother's level of education with students opting for a vocational or
technical school if their mothers did not have a history of higher level education.