Brussels Moves to Fix Its Duplicate Street Image Problem — and Residents Stand to Gain Most

Brussels municipal authorities are working through a backlog of duplicate and outdated images embedded across city-facing digital platforms — a technical clean-up that sounds unglamorous but has real consequences for anyone trying to navigate public services, housing applications, or neighbourhood planning consultations online. The issue came into sharper focus this spring when the Urban.brussels planning directorate acknowledged that its public-facing property portal was displaying multiple conflicting photographs of the same parcels, in some cases showing buildings since demolished or renovated.

The problem is not trivial. Brussels residents now complete an estimated 60 percent of their interactions with city services digitally, according to figures published by the Brussels-Capital Region's digital transition office earlier this year. When the images underpinning those platforms are wrong — showing an entrance that no longer exists, or flagging a facade under a listed-buildings programme that has since been discharged — errors cascade. A resident in Molenbeek filing a renovation permit sees the wrong reference photo. A family consulting the Commune de Schaerbeek housing register pulls up a 2019 street-view thumbnail that predates a full-facade replacement. The system undermines confidence before anyone picks up a phone.

Where the Problem Bites Hardest

Two areas of Brussels have drawn particular attention from community organisations tracking the issue. Along the Chaussée de Forest in Forest commune, a corridor of mixed-use buildings that has seen rapid turnover since the 2022 urban renewal designation, the Urban.brussels portal has at various points shown between two and four conflicting images per address for properties involved in active permit applications. The Forest commune's own digital services desk confirmed to neighbourhood association Comité Chaussée de Forest that the duplication was causing applicants to submit incorrect supporting documents, slowing approvals.

In the European Quarter near Rue Belliard, the situation carries different stakes. Several buildings linked to the renovation of the former Résidence Palace complex — now housing international press and civil-society organisations — appeared in at least three separate image registries under inconsistent address codes, a discrepancy that affected grant eligibility checks run by Perspective Brussels, the regional planning agency. When entries collide, automated eligibility filters reject applications before a human reviewer ever sees them.

The city's Bosa digital administration agency, which oversees data governance for the Brussels-Capital Region, has been running a deduplication pilot since March 2026 targeting roughly 14,000 flagged image records across six communes. The programme uses a combination of automated hash-matching — a technique that identifies pixel-identical or near-identical files — and manual review for contested entries. Bosa has set an internal completion target of December 2026 for the first phase, covering the communes of Ixelles, Saint-Gilles, Forest, Schaerbeek, Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, and Etterbeek.

What Residents Should Do Now

The practical upshot for anyone mid-process with the city is straightforward: check the reference images attached to your dossier before submitting. Urban.brussels updated its portal guidance in June 2026 to include a step prompting applicants to verify that the displayed property image matches the current state of the building. If it does not, applicants can now flag the discrepancy directly through a new form linked from the permit submission page — a step that triggers a manual review rather than an automatic hold.

Community organisations including IEB (Inter-Environnement Bruxelles), which monitors urban policy across all 19 Brussels communes, have been advising residents at their rue d'Edimbourg offices to screenshot the image displayed at the point of submission and retain it as part of their personal records. That advice has particular value for residents in areas where building stock is changing fast — the canal zone north of Molenbeek, the Josaphat development zone in Schaerbeek, and the dense residential streets around the Gare du Midi.

The deduplication programme will not solve every problem on its own. But the December 2026 deadline for phase one gives residents a concrete reference point: applications submitted after that date, at least in the six pilot communes, should be working from cleaner data. For a city where digital administration is increasingly the first and sometimes only point of contact between residents and their government, getting the images right is not a back-office detail. It is the front door.