Brussels Officials and Urban Planners Sound Alarm Over Duplicate Images Flooding City's Digital Archive

Brussels' urban administration is confronting a growing problem buried inside its own digital systems: duplicate images — some numbering in the tens of thousands — have accumulated inside the city's GIS and heritage databases, creating errors in planning records and inflating storage costs that ultimately fall on the public budget. The issue surfaced publicly this spring when Brussels Urbanism and Heritage, the regional body overseeing development permits, flagged irregularities in its digital asset catalogue during an internal audit that concluded in April 2026.

The timing matters. The Brussels Capital Region has been midway through a multi-year push to digitise its permitting and heritage documentation systems, a project running under the broader Smart City Brussels programme launched in 2022. As more photographs of streetscapes, building façades and neighbourhood surveys get uploaded — covering areas from the Marolles to Schaerbeek — duplicate entries are multiplying faster than staff can manually remove them. The result is a database that is simultaneously bloated and unreliable.

What Officials and Experts Are Saying

Urban data specialists at Innoviris, the Brussels regional research and innovation agency based on Rue Royale, have been consulting with city departments on automated deduplication tools. Experts working in this field argue that without systematic software intervention, manual correction is simply not viable at scale — a view shared by archivists at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, known by its French acronym KIK-IRPA, whose offices sit on Parc du Cinquantenaire. The institute maintains its own photographic archive of protected buildings across Belgium and has dealt with deduplication challenges since digitising legacy film collections.

Within the Brussels Capital Region's own administration, the Urban Planning Information System — locally referred to as NOVA — has been identified as the primary repository where duplicate entries cause the most operational friction. Permit officers have reported pulling up multiple near-identical images of the same Ixelles townhouse or Saint-Gilles courtyard facade, forcing manual cross-checks that slow down permit assessments. Planners familiar with the system describe it as a confidence problem: when records look inconsistent, officials hesitate to rely on them.

Technology consultants working with Bruxelles Environnement, the regional environment agency, have pointed to perceptual hashing and machine-learning classifiers as the most cost-effective solutions currently available. These tools compare image content rather than file names, catching duplicates that a simple filename or metadata check would miss entirely.

Costs and the Road to Remediation

The financial dimension is not trivial. Cloud storage costs for the Brussels Capital Region's government infrastructure rose by roughly 18 percent between 2023 and 2025 as data volumes expanded, according to figures cited in the region's 2025 digital strategy progress report published in February of this year. While duplicate images are not the sole driver of that increase, data managers within the administration have flagged them as a contributing factor that is addressable in the short term.

A pilot deduplication project covering the Pentagone — the old city centre bound by the inner ring boulevard — is expected to begin before the end of the third quarter of 2026. If successful, the model would extend to outer municipalities including Etterbeek and Anderlecht, where heritage survey photography has been digitised only recently. The cost of the pilot has not been publicly disclosed, but comparable municipal deduplication exercises in cities like Amsterdam and Ghent have run to between €40,000 and €120,000 depending on archive size and the complexity of metadata structures involved.

For residents and property owners, the practical stakes are real. A planning application that references incorrect or outdated photographic evidence can delay approvals by weeks. Architects working on renovation projects along streets like Rue Haute in the Marolles have long complained about documentation inconsistencies, though the connection to duplicate images has only recently been formally investigated.

The next step for Brussels Urbanism and Heritage is a public procurement notice expected in July 2026 to select a technology partner for the wider remediation effort. Urban data advocates say the city should use that contract to build in ongoing deduplication as a standard maintenance function rather than treating it as a one-off fix — otherwise, the same problem will resurface within three to five years as the archive continues to grow.