Urban Brussels #1 | Co-Creating knowledge for the society of tomorrow

            Each year, the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies launches a call for the funding of several projects, which is open to all VUB research groups and researchers. The awarded projects engage with the broad field of urban studies and with concepts linked to (i) inter-and transdisciplinary perspectives on cities and ‘the urban’, (ii) comparative urbanism and (iii) engaged research connecting academia with other actors and networks, such as NGOs, civil society, government administrations and businesses. The Urban Brussels podcast is a series of 5 twenty-minute episodes aiming to present the evolution of the BCUS awarded projects of 2020. The podcast aspires to introduce each project's main goal, its relation with urban studies, the main activities that took place and the insights that were unravelled. Every episode focuses on one particular awarded project by realising an online discussion with the people most closely involved in its organisation.
          

Listen to the Urban Brussels #1 podcast here! Featuring Laure Malchair & Maëlle Van der Linden (Confluences asbl).

The Region of Brussels is confronted with a lot of complex crises (health, environmental, social, housing, transportation, availability of natural resources...), needing therefore for their resolution the creation of innovative ways of thinking about the city and a development of creative solutions with all actors involved (public institutions, non-profit, researchers, citizens, students, social workers, research funders). Unfortunately, that does not happen enough today, because of explicit and implicit socio-technical barriers between citizens, researchers and policymakers. In March 2021, the ASBL Confluences organised its first edition of the Thematic School on co-creation research aiming to address these issues through the facilitation of the communication between all these actors.

“The BCUS funding was essential as we were a young organisation and it was important for us to diversify. Moreover, it was really essential in order to be able to touch new people, to make new contacts and to make the initiative known. We had this will to make it accessible. I think if we would have been obliged to ask the participants to pay the real price, it would have been absolutely impossible. We really wanted to make it accessible so it was essential to be able to lower the price thanks to the subsidy we received from BCUS.” (Laure Malchair, Confluences)

The event took place online and in-person in Brussels. The school brought together 81 people from various backgrounds involved in participatory science approaches however reaching this goal for the involvement of diversity of public was not an easy process.

“As we knew it a lot of researchers and PhD students were super interested so without any kind of selection we would have had just researchers.” (Maëlle Van der Linden, Confluences)

“It’s not so obvious for the other categories of people, so we had to adapt the language, pay attention to all the details, be recommended by certain people and then to spend approximately one hour to discuss with the associations. I think those were the different strategies we employed in order to diversify.” (Laure Malchair, Confluences)

By the end of the winter school, what the organizers wanted to achieve was train, accompany and encourage the reflexivity of urban actors who really want to engage science in society and to draw the attention to the practices developed in terms of citizen sciences, participatory action research and transdisciplinarity because as Maelle Van der Linden, member of the School’s organising team explains:

“Transdisciplinary projects have a greater possibility to achieve change and build innovation in Brussels, more than many other territories. In BCR we are so much more in link with some politicians, authorities, administrations, nonprofits and things here move faster than other places.”

Project members: Nicola da Schio, Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research (VUB) [Nicola.Da.Schio@vub.be] • Laure Malchair, Confluences ASBL [laurem@cocreate.brussels] • Maëlle Van der Linden, Confluences ASBL [maelle@cocreate.brussels]