Executive summary
Together, Permanent aimed to develop a mixed-use building in Brussels that combines permanently affordable studios and workspaces for artists and artworkers with permanently affordable and transit housing for people with limited means and/or in precarity, as well as public infrastructure tailored to the needs of the users and initiators of the building and the neigbourhood.
In order to realize this, this project looks into anti-speculative development models from the commons- and cooperative economy that propose alternative, collective forms of ownership. The starting point is to keep the land collectively owned, as proposed by the Community Land Trust model. Through the development of this building the aim is not only to meet the need of artists for affordable workspaces but also to push for more inclusive urban development strategies in Brussels, by developing a tangible mixed-use development model based on collective ownership.
The project consisted of a large campaign in order to build public and political awareness on this topic, a participatory research trajectory bringing together key actors from Brussels and elsewhere, dedicated legal advice on new ownership models, and a series of short public reports synthesizing the key points emerging from the project.
Why it matters
Brussels is increasingly becoming a city of the arts and is investing in presentation infrastructure, but it is lagging seriously behind in terms of studio and production infrastructure. There is a growing threat of an acute shortage of affordable workspace as Brussels develops rapidly. Artists and art workers are reaching the limits of what temporary use can offer them, not least because it severely compromises their long-term relationship with the neighborhood. There is a need for a more sustainable solution. Temporary use is also increasingly becoming an intermediate step in the marketing and increasing the value of real estate. The energy that artists invest in temporary use unwittingly drives the vulnerable groups with whom they want to show solidarity out of the city, and thus, in the long term, themselves as well. The needs of art and artists are increasingly being pitted against the needs of other vulnerable groups. The potential of mutualizing and tackling certain needs together could be much better exploited.
Project objectives
Objective 1: Investigate one specific building in the Brussels-Capital Region and develop scenarios for mixed-used development with an important component for artists and artists’ spaces.
Objective 2: Move beyond temporary use and identify possible routes towards collective and long-term ownership: ranging from long-term leases to community land trusts or other financial/governance models.
Objective 3: Use the project to mobilize a diverse set of actors in Brussels around this topic and create strong visibility that can influence future policy and civic imaginaries.
Key findings
Key finding 1: Community land trust and other commons or cooperative oriented initiatives are well-established in the domain of housing, but very much underdeveloped in other domains, such as arts and culture. There is also limited knowledge on the funding and governance conditions that can enable for the long-term mixed-use infrastructures.
Key finding 2: While there is a lot of grassroots activity experimenting with collective setups, moving beyond a temporary use and often precarious setup remains challenging due to limited budgets, limited organizational capacity and unfamiliarity within the world of urban planning and policy with the topic.
Key finding 3: Competition for space is real: artists looking for space to work is often in competition with other equally important functions, ranging from affordable housing to ecological infrastructures to social infrastructures and spaces of care more broadly.
Project partners
Els Silvrants-Barclay, Rob Ritzen, Lynn Tytgat
Output
Publication: Collective cultural infrastructures: ownership, architecture, governance
One major output of the BCUS-funded project was the 3-day Building Beyond: Collective Strategies for Just Cities conference, which attracted >100 people and offered a combination of lectures, roundtables, city walks and design/interactive workshops. This ‘closing’ conference was preceded by a series of smaller workshops which took the fire station as central object of (imagined) intervention. For more information on these workshops, see: https://www.permanentbrussels.org/en/trajectory (info on Workshop 1 to 5).
Follow-up research: the ‘groundwork’ done by Permanent ultimately led the succesful funding application of the WELCOMIN project, funded by Innoviris
More info
Reach out to Bas van Heur