About the atlas
Why did a child born in Antwerp in 1900 have such different odds of survival than one born in Brussels the same year? Why do some Belgian municipalities still have noticeably lower life expectancy than others, even now? And why does the answer to “what will most likely kill you” look completely different depending on the century, the region, or the social class you were born into?
The Ineqkill Atlas explores these questions using more than two centuries of data on death in Belgium, from 1800 to 2025. It’s built around a simple but far-reaching idea: how people die is never random. It follows patterns of place, of poverty and wealth, of medical progress, of the diseases that define an era. Mapping those patterns tells us as much about Belgian society as it does about medicine.
What you'll find in the atlas
At its core, this atlas answers one question from many different angles: what has been killing people in Belgium, and how has that changed over time and from place to place?
You can explore this through:
- Mortality patterns over time — how Belgium moved from a country where infectious disease and epidemics cut lives short, to one where people live over twice as long as they did in 1840, and die mostly from very different causes. This includes how life expectancy evolved, why men and women’s lifespans diverged, and how risk of death shifts across the lifespan.
- Causes of death, one by one — dedicated pages tracing the rise and fall of major killers such as cholera, cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia and alcohol-related mortality, alongside a timeline of Belgium’s deadliest epidemics.
- The social and spatial side of mortality — because two people born in the same year didn’t face the same odds. The atlas looks at how income, education, place of residence and access to care have shaped who lived and who didn’t, and how access to doctors and hospitals changed over two centuries.
Everything is grounded in historical and contemporary data – civil registers, censuses, and modern cause-of-death statistics – which you can trace through our Sources page. Unfamiliar with a term along the way? Check the Glossary.
Why this matters
Death is often treated as the great equalizer — but the data says otherwise. Where inequality in income or education gets debated constantly, inequality in how long you live and what eventually kills you is easy to overlook, precisely because it plays out over decades and across generations.
By tracing mortality patterns back to 1800, this atlas makes that inequality visible — not as an abstract statistic, but as a pattern you can see change, place by place and disease by disease. Understanding how it emerged, how it evolved and how it has (or hasn’t) narrowed, is directly relevant to public health policy today, and to anyone trying to understand why health outcomes still differ so much between neighbourhoods, regions, or social groups.
The research behind the atlas
Old version The Atlas of Mortality Inequality in Belgium was created by the team of the INEQKILL Research Project. It is the result of a collaboration between the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Ghent University, and Université Catholique de Louvain. The project is an EOS Excellence of Science research project that was initiated in 2022. Read more about the project at www.ineqkill.be.
Demographers, historians, sociologists, and geographers worked together on collecting data about health and mortality in Belgium. For more information on the sources used to construct the atlas visit our sources page.
The Digital Atlas of Health Inequality is part of INEQKILL research project which was funded by EOS Excellence of Science Research call of 2021.
The Ineqkill Atlas is the public face of INEQKILL, a research project studying two centuries of social and spatial inequality in mortality in Belgium (1800–2025). Running from 2022 to 2026, INEQKILL is funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and the Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.–FNRS) through Belgium’s Excellence of Science (EOS) programme, and carried out by demographers, historians, epidemiologists and geographers at Ghent University, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and UCLouvain.
Everything on this site — the maps, the articles, the underlying data — comes out of that research. We built the atlas so that these findings don’t stay confined to academic journals, but become something anyone can explore directly.
The team
The atlas is written and built by the researchers and staff behind INEQKILL, coordinators, researchers, data managers and a dedicated editorial team turning years of research into maps, articles and visuals you can actually use. Meet everyone involved on our [Team page →].
Get in touch
Questions about the project, the data, or a possible collaboration? [Contact us] — we’re happy to hear from researchers, teachers, journalists and curious visitors alike.
Colophon
The Ineqkill Atlas is published by the INEQKILL research project.
Coordinating institution: Vrije Universiteit Brussel — Interface Demography Pleinlaan 5 (Room 2.17), 1050 Brussels, Belgium Contact: sylvie.gadeyne@vub.be
Partner institutions: Ghent University, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and UCLouvain. Full research team details are available on the [Team] page.
Funding: INEQKILL is funded through the Excellence of Science (EOS) programme, a joint initiative of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and the Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.–FNRS), for a four-year period (2022–2026).
How to cite this atlas “Ineqkill Atlas (2026). Atlas of Mortality Inequalities in Belgium, 1800–2025. INEQKILL research project, Ghent University / VUB / UCLouvain. mortalityatlas.ugent.be” .
A persistent identifier (DOI) for this atlas is not yet available; this section will be updated once one has been assigned.
Copyright © INEQKILL. CC BY-NC 4.0 (“Attribution-NonCommercial”)