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 Eco-Resilient City, the Fluid City and the Breathing City.
On the week of the 18th of March, the chair of Brussels Studies Institute took place. In that context, we were happy to welcome Raquel Rolnik, a professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at University of São Paulo. During a week, Raquel Rolnik shared her insights from over 45
In the first week of March, the WELCOMIN team was in Berlin to carry out fieldwork concerning the second scenario of the research. Named the Fluid City, this scenario works from a perspective of 20 years from now. In this scenario, we account that the population of Brussels would have
Closing the Fall Semester, the mid-term presentations of the Design Studio participants will fuel a collective discussion on the typology of community welfare mixed infrastructures (WELCOMINs) in Brussels and their genealogy. Centred on care, these initiatives are the expression of an ecological welfare and the infrastructure of an eco-resilient city.
The mixed-method research approach of the project will explore the potential of community welfare infrastructures by interweaving:
Based on this approach, WELCOMIN will develop a prospective strategy and policy recommendations supporting the realisation of community welfare infrastructures in the Brussels-Capital Region.
Although still a niche within established disciplines, research on urban vacancy has boomed in recent decades, with di;erent research communities investigating different dimensions of vacancy. However, these communities rarely communicate with each other, leading to parallel debates, di;erent conceptual vocabularies and diverging empirical foci. This becomes particularly problematic in the current era, which is best characterized not simply as an ’urban age’, but as one in which city regions find themselves at the heart of economic, ecological and societal crises that are reshaping our world. Vacant spaces can be understood as symptoms of these crises, but also as actually existing and potential sites for experimentation, prefiguring new and more sustainable ways of urban living. To develop this perspective conceptually and empirically, the current paper offers a synthetic review of the existing literature, with a specific focus on the European context. Cutting across different research domains, the paper concludes by proposing an interdisciplinary research agenda on urban vacancy.
by Bas van Heur, Els Silvrants-Barclay, Menna Agha. – In this article, we discuss three core concerns: developing diverse and flexible understandings and models of ownership, designing architectural typologies that contribute to more accessible and inclusive cultural spaces, and realizing modes of grassroots urban governance that allow for collective action beyond token participation.
Verena Lenna
Senior researcher
verena.lenna@vub.be
Arshia Ali Azmat
Researcher & community organiser
arshia.azmat@vub.be
Contact: info@welcomin.brussels
Bas van Heur
Project supervisor
bas.van.heur@vub.be
Nele Aernouts
Project supervisor
nele.aernouts@vub.be
Els Silvrants-Barclay
Associate partner
els@permanentbrussels.org
A RESEARCH PROJECT BY COSMOPOLIS (VUB) FUNDED BY INNOVIRIS | © WELCOMIN 2023-2025
