Lecture: The Return to the Centre - Brussels and the Recovery of the Inner City

Thursday, October 22, 2026
9:00 am CT

1 HSW CEU Credit will be offered
Thomson Hall (Room 202), Richardson Memorial Hall
Tulane University, 6823 St. Charles Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70118

This lecture is open to the public.

Invited lecture "The Return to the Centre - Brussels and the Recovery of the Inner City," will be presented by Marnix Galle (B.A. Economics '85) Executive Chairman of Immobel Group, Belgium's oldest listed real estate developer, founded in 1863 and today active across several European markets. It is part of the Fall 2026 Lecture Series and Public Programs: "Emergency: Planning and Adaptation."

LECTURE SUMMARY

For half a century, value migrated out of European city centres while the inner city was left to hollow out. Brussels lived that story more visibly than most, and it is now reversing it. Marnix Galle will trace that reversal through the work he has led since 2001 — first at Allfin, the developer he founded, and since 2016 at Immobel, a listed Belgian real estate developer — taking obsolete twentieth-century stock in central Brussels, office towers built for a way of working that has gone and blocks that had fallen out of use, and returning it to the city as places where people live, work and gather. Oxy, Lebeau and Brouck'R are recent evidence. The lecture looks at what made those projects possible: the capital, the permits, the politics and the design decisions, and the energy — in both directions — that drives changes of this scale or impedes them. Each of the three came close to failing before it prevailed. New Orleans faces its own version of the same question, and the lecture is offered in that spirit. 

This lecture is supported by A Mary W. and Arthur Q. Davis.

ABOUT THE LECTURER

Marnix Galle is Executive Chairman of Immobel Group, Belgium's oldest listed real estate developer, founded in 1863 and today active across several European markets. He has led the company since 2016, building it from a domestic developer into an international group operating in office, residential, mixed-use and hospitality development. His work has centred on the redevelopment of obsolete twentieth-century building stock in central Brussels, including the transformation of landmark modernist office towers into mixed-use quarters. He serves as a director of several listed and private companies and has been a long-standing voice on the economics of urban regeneration in Europe. 

Questions? Please reach out to Ben Neal at bneal1@tulane.edu.