How Brussels Ended Up with a City Covered in Copied Images: The Story Behind the Duplicate Photo Problem

Brussels has a duplicate image problem. Across the databases maintained by the 19 communes, by urban planning bodies, and by cultural heritage institutions, tens of thousands of photographs, architectural scans, and planning documents exist in multiple identical or near-identical copies — stored redundantly, filed under different reference numbers, and in some cases contradicting each other on matters of record. The Brussels Capital Region's push to consolidate its digital public archives, which began in earnest under the 2023 Smart Region strategy, has forced this disorder into the open.

The issue matters now because the Region is mid-way through its effort to digitise the urban planning register — a legal document base used by notaries, developers, and citizens to verify building histories and permits. Errors caused by duplicate or mismatched image files can delay property transactions and, in contested renovation cases, affect which version of a building's photographic record carries legal weight. That is not a theoretical concern along the Rue Belliard or in the dense residential blocks of Molenbeek-Saint-Jean: it is already happening.

How the Duplication Built Up Over Two Decades

The roots of the problem go back to the early 2000s. Each of Brussels' 19 communes digitised its own records independently, on its own timeline and with its own file-naming conventions. Urban.brussels, the regional planning agency established in its current form in 2017, inherited archives from predecessor bodies including BRUXELLES DÉVELOPPEMENT URBAIN and the former Institut Bruxellois pour la Gestion de l'Environnement. Each handover created a new layer of replicated files.

The Inventory of Architectural Heritage, maintained by heritage.brussels from its offices on the Rue du Progrès, compounded the issue. When the inventory went digital, photographs of protected facades in areas such as Ixelles and Saint-Gilles were often ingested from multiple source institutions simultaneously. The same 1960s photograph of a listed Art Nouveau townhouse might sit in three separate folders under three different catalogue numbers — none flagged as a duplicate because no common metadata standard existed to identify them.

A 2024 audit commissioned by the Brussels Capital Region — cited in a public procurement notice issued in March 2025 — found that roughly 34 percent of image files held across the major regional digital repositories were either exact duplicates or near-duplicates requiring human review. The audit covered an estimated 1.2 million files. Resolving the problem has been costed internally at between €2.1 million and €2.8 million, depending on the extent of manual verification required alongside automated deduplication tools.

What Triggered the Current Review

The immediate catalyst was a planning dispute in the Quartier Européen in late 2024. A developer applying for renovation permits on a building near the Place du Luxembourg submitted photographic evidence that conflicted with imagery held in the Urban.brussels register — not because either set of photographs was falsified, but because the register contained two different scan generations of the same original print, one of which had been digitally enhanced and one had not. The discrepancy took three months to resolve administratively.

That case drew attention from the Brussels Regional Parliament's committee on digital governance, which called Urban.brussels to account in a session held in February 2026. The hearing exposed the absence of any cross-institutional deduplication protocol and prompted the Region to accelerate procurement for a purpose-built image reconciliation system. A tender was issued through the federal e-procurement platform in April 2026, with responses due by 30 June.

For residents and professionals who rely on these archives — architects working in the Marolles, notaries handling sales in Etterbeek, heritage officers reviewing applications in Schaerbeek — the practical advice is straightforward: when ordering digital records from any Brussels commune or regional body for a transaction or permit application, explicitly request confirmation that the file reference has been cross-checked against the Urban.brussels master register. That step is not automatic. Until the new reconciliation system is live, expected no earlier than the first quarter of 2027, the responsibility for catching conflicts remains with the requester.