Ecologic mutations in the precarious city. The Community Land Trust in Brussels as a form of a resilient attitude

Despite the current economic downturn and the ineluctable decline of the industrial activities, Brussels continues to attract substantial migrational waves as a consequence of its world city economy. Precarity and increasing socio-spatial segregation, poverty, young unemployment, housing shortage are some of the main urgencies exacerbated by the demographic evolution in course. In order to maintain its performativity, in between static and dynamic efficiency, the city will necessarily have to elaborate some critical, structural changes. The Community Land Trust Brussels projects are based on a property formula which prevents speculation and makes possible homeownership for low-moderate income households. In this paper they are framed as prototypes of an urban mutation which performs emerging values of use, in tension between the crisis of the welfare and the bio-cultural changes in course. Still at an embryonic state, operating at the scale of the neighbourhood and of the block, these projects suggest alternative models of wellbeing and support social mobility, by operating at the level of the most elementary dimensions of cohabitation. Their contribution to the resilient attitude of the city has thus to be questioned, in consideration of the socio-spatial dynamics and the patterns of development in which they are embedded.

Publication year:2014