At the edge of Schaerbeek, the former Marchandises hall had long stopped trading anything but silence. A relic of the industrial age, it stood idle—massive, forgotten, closed in on itself. Too big to ignore, too complex to reuse easily, too full of asbestos to daydream. Around it, the city hesitated. What do you do with a space that has lost both its function and its narrative? For years, the answer was: nothing. Yet the bones of the place still held something—a kind of dormant potential, waiting to be disturbed. Because in cities, the real waste isn’t physical. It’s spatial. It’s the habit of giving up on spaces before asking them what they could become