Transformative practices of inhabitation as an implicit urban project: moving from ethnography to projective scenarios in three large-scale social housing estates in Brussels.

Large-scale post-war modernist social housing estates in Europe and thus also in Belgium have been increasingly questioned in terms of liveability and sustainability. Recent planning policies tend to focus on refurbishments and demolitions, often disconnected from the needs of an already stigmatized and excluded public. Such disconnect is further complexified by changes in the housing audience and the political imperative of resident participation as part of community capacity building. By contrast, existing spatial practices and the lived experience of place are rarely used as leverage while the contours of the neighbourhood are re-designed by spatial and social policies. This gap forms the basis for the project’s research hypothesis and design. By addressing three salient social housing cases through an everyday perspective, this research will apprehend, represent and visualise how on-going practices of inhabitation are already transforming these neighbourhoods from within. The inter-disciplinary investigation combining anthropology and urbanism, aims to fundamentally interrogate the patent disconnect between residents’ existing spatial practices and on-going social cohesion policies.

Keywords:social housing, urban borderlands, Brussels, projective ethnography

Disciplines:Anthropology, Urban and regional design, development and planning