Community Welfare Mixed Infrastructures.
Reclaiming vacancy, federating capacities
and empowering communities towards
an ecological welfare
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.
Scenario 1
THE ECO-RESILIENT CITY
Scenario 2
THE FLUID CITY
Scenario 3
THE BREATHING CITY
News
Research
approach
The mixed-method research approach of the project will explore the potential of community welfare infrastructures by interweaving:
- multiscalar comparative urban research to generate realistic knowledge on the three scenarios based on actual observations and empirical research on initiatives across Europe;
- research-by-design to prefigure how community welfare infrastructures would operate in Brussels under the conditions of the Resilient City, Breathing City and Fluid City scenarios;
- participatory action techniques to engage with local actors and communities to ensure visions and proposals on concrete projects are horizontally produced.
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.
Publications
Team
& partners
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
