In Brussels, whether you are a renowned architect or an individual wishing to change the nature of your building, you must confront the sometimes painful permit request. A procedure which very frequently leads to having to carry out a public inquiry. During this investigation, the documents relating to your urban planning project must be consultable because anyone must be able to express an opinion on your plans. The future Defense headquarters, located straddling the territory of Brussels and Flanders, is no exception to the rule.
La Derniere Heure, as soon as it became aware of the posting of the said documents online, given their particular nature, alerted the office of the Secretary of State in charge of Urban Planning Ans Persoons (Vooruit) who, in turn, notified Defense and had the plans removed from the website as a precaution. These are therefore no longer accessible at the time of writing these lines. However, these documents will still have remained online for almost 48 hours, downloadable and without access restrictions.
“Cleaned plans”
An architecturally discerning eye could immediately notice: these plans were not ordinary. In fact, we could not see the precise assignments and functions of each room. “These are cleaned, refined plans, where we had put the bare minimum to comply with the public inquiry procedure for the sake of transparency,” comments the Defense. It is therefore impossible to know which general will occupy which office, etc. However, the access and circulation plans of the place are already sensitive information in themselves. A competent person could probably make these plans more public.
“We thought that the documents would be accessible only on request and without being able to make a copy,” comments the project manager for Defense. “Those who consulted them had to be identifiable.” But that was before Openpermits, when you had to make a request to the municipality to have access to the file of a public inquiry. “We didn’t think it would happen like this, that the plans would be downloadable by everyone, without being able to know who had viewed what. But we also had to provide these plans, particularly for Siamu (Fire and emergency medical aid service of the Brussels-Capital Region) in the event of evacuation of the future building.”
Whose fault is it?
These documents should therefore not have been made available to the general public. The regional administration in charge of processing Urban permit applications. brussels explains the procedure: “as part of the public inquiry to obtain the permit, it is the applicant for the project (here, Defense, Editor’s note) who is responsible for uploading documents to the Openpermits platform a few days before the start of the investigation. Once the documents have been submitted and the file is complete, it is automatically posted online after validation by the applicant. Urban does not intervene in this aspect and is not responsible for the documents uploaded to the platform.”
The regional administration further specifies that, even in the case of a sensitive site, such as Haren prison or Defense HQ, “there is no specific procedure because it is always the requester who is in charge of the documents he uploads to the platform.” The Defense project manager assures us that an investigation is underway to identify the downloads of the plans that may have been made.
The new headquarters project was not aborted. “No sensitive information was released. These were indeed cleaned plans, but obviously, it’s… disturbing,” concludes the Defense. However, the public inquiry must be carried out and here, the Defense qualifies: “we will then put documents and plans online, always for the sake of transparency, but their content will be much more limited.”
