The shortlist

The coolest neighborhoods in Antwerp.

Every city gets one answer here. That's the rule. In Antwerp the answer is Borgerhout, and it wasn't close. But three other neighborhoods made the shortlist, and each one would win in a lesser city. Here's the ranking, and here's why the order is what it is.

01

Borgerhout The pick

The others have better museums, better architecture, better shopping. Borgerhout beat them anyway. The decisive part: this is the only neighborhood on the list where the culture is made by the people who live there, not staged for the people who visit. Rent is still low enough that a place like Cabardouche Taproom or Tapis Plain can open without a business plan blessed by a bank. You hear four languages ordering at the same counter. Het Zuid hangs art on walls. Borgerhout is the thing the art gets made about. When the coffee costs double, we'll move the pick. Not yet.

Read the full case for Borgerhout →
02

Het Zuid

The institutional heavyweight. KMSKA reopened in 2022 after eleven years of renovation and pulled over half a million visitors in 2023 alone. Volkstraat is packed with restaurants worth your evening, Tommy Bocklandt took a Michelin star in 2024, and the big galleries are already colonizing Nieuw Zuid, Tim Van Laere and Sofie Van de Velde among them. So why second? Because it's finished. The money arrived, the crowd got sophisticated, and the surprise left. Quay works run until at least 2028, so the district keeps changing, but from the top down, not the street up.

03

Sint-Andries

Kammenstraat is still where independent labels plant flags, Arte Antwerp's flagship sits at number 45, and shop counts in the Kammenstraat and Kleine Markt zone are actually growing while retail shrinks citywide. MoMu anchors the fashion credibility. The wildcard: an approved plan makes Kammenstraat car-free, and a community hub renovation is underway. If the pedestrian street feeds the shops instead of sanding off the scrappiness, and if that hub becomes a real gathering point, Sint-Andries makes a serious run at the top spot in a few years.

04

Zurenborg

Cogels-Osylei and Waterloostraat hold the most photogenic housing stock in the country, saved from 1960s demolition by residents who refused to move, now protected across more than 170 monuments. Dageraadplaats is the square people actually live on. But that protection froze the place. One-bedrooms run €1,000 to €1,300, the crowd is families and settled professionals, and nothing new opens because nothing new can. The new Statiepark will link Zurenborg to Borgerhout along the rail line. Fitting. One side has the facades, the other has the pulse.

No juries, no sponsors. How we pick explains the rules; Borgerhout is where they landed.

Last updated