Urban Brussels #5 | Permanent Brussels | Brussels Centre for Urban Studies

            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 #5 podcast here! Featuring Els Silvrants-Barclay (Permanent Brussels) and Bas van Heur (Brussels Centre for Urban Studies & Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research, VUB).

Permanent constitutes a coalition of 150 artists and artworkers –currently based in the former Actiris building close to la Bourse–, VUB/weKONEKT.brussels and Community Land Trust Brussels (CLTB). The aim of the Permanent project was to develop a multifunctional building in Brussels that combines affordable studios and workspaces for artists and artworkers, low-cost transit housing for people with limited means and/or in precarity, and public infrastructure tailored to the needs of the users and initiators of the building and the neighbourhood.

"Artists unwantedly have been made complicit to processes of gentrification by actually taking up temporary use solutions for working spaces... Permanent wanted to set up a different model where, on the one hand, artists would be able to get space but, on the other hand, they would also be part of a more inclusive urban development... We are trying to develop a mixed-use infrastructure where, instead of trying just to cover the needs of artists for ateliers, we are immediately trying to common the needs of artists with other groups that otherwise are often in competition with one another." (Els Silvrants-Barclay)

The project set out to look at anti-speculative development models from the commons- and cooperative economy that propose alternative, collective forms of ownership. Through the development of this infrastructure, Permanent aimed not only to meet the need of artists for affordable workspaces but also to push for more inclusive urban development strategies in Brussels, by advancing a tangible mixed-use development model based on collective ownership.

"The challenges of this (interdisciplinary) approach were set mainly with the political framework because the field within which we operate (architecture, urban studies, cultural studies) is fundamentally multidisciplinary but sometimes politics and policy making isn't necessarily accustomed at this interdisciplinarity." (Els Silvrants-Barclay)

Permanent Brussels was a project centred on (i) a large campaign aiming to create public and political awareness on and support for mixed, anti-speculative and permanent infrastructure, (ii) a participatory research trajectory bringing together key actors from Brussels and elsewhere and (iii) dedicated legal advice on new ownership models.

"Beyond property, beyond participation, beyond site –as we labelled them– were the core problematics of this project. We cannot have a clear answer for each of them, but we gained different insights from the actors involved in the project, including on a more legal and technical level." (Bas van Heur)

Project organising team: Bas van Heur (VUB, Brussels Centre for Urban Studies & Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research), Lynn Tytgat (VUB, weKONEKT.brussels & Permanent Brussels), Rob Ritzen (Level Five – Artistic Ecology & Permanent Brussels), Els Silvrants-Barclay (Permanent Brussels)