All Things Urban

“Caring is sharing’” only partially describes the spirit of many practices happening in the voids left behind by an overstretched welfare state. From community kitchens to temporary shelters for refugees, from spaces for artistic and cultural production to educational activities for young people. Vacant sites and buildings, offer the opportunity to experiment with new ecological forms of welfare, based on the needs and capacities of the concerned communities and their living environments. But vacancy is increasingly instrumentalized in speculative urban development projects, putting different communities in competition for affordable space.

Beyond temporary occupations, what if these community welfare mixed infrastructures could be permanent? Which spatial, governance, legal and financial arrangements would be needed need to realize them? How could they contribute to the urban and social resilience of a building, a neighbourhood, the city as a whole? Crucially, caring is also owning.

As part of the WELCOMIN project, this intensive international workshop explores the limitations and potentials of community ownership and community welfare mixed infrastructures in Brussels. In the framework of a prospective approach and supported by the input of international experts and local actors, research by design will allow envisioning spatial, functional and governance arrangements that can lay the foundation for caring and community-centred policies and cities.

This inter- and transdisciplinary workshop is open to researchers, postgraduate students and practitioners from various fields such as architecture and urban design, anthropology, spatial planning, urban geography, law, visual arts, economics, real estate studies and related disciplines.

Enrolment: send your motivation letter, CV and portfolio (where applicable) to e-mail address – info@welcomin.brussels

Application deadline: 24 January 2023

As we cannot offer a place to every applicant, a limited number will be selected.

As part of their welfare state regimes, local administrations have realised in the past a variety of infrastructures for the health and well-being of their inhabitants. Not only hospitals or housing but also parks, cultural and community centres, sports and recreational facilities. Their effectiveness is challenged today by interlinked dynamics of real estate speculation, internal and external migrations, growing precarity and environmental challenges.

In response to this, community-based initiatives have emerged that reclaim vacant buildings and sites and experiment with site-specific infrastructures of care and solidarity, filling the infrastructural voids ‘left behind’ by an overstretched public welfare state. These community welfare mixed infrastructures -or WELCOMINs- are laboratories for radical urban transformation and individual and collective emancipation. Going beyond single-issue politics and policies that prioritize the needs and rights of some groups over others, they feature mixed-use programs, hybrid spatial morphologies and horizontal forms of governance.

Funded by Innoviris in the framework of the Prospective Research programme, the WELCOMIN project will investigate community welfare mixed infrastructures in the Brussels Capital Region under different demographic and vacancy conditions represented by three scenarios: the Resilient City, the Breathing City, and the Fluid City.