Speaker
Description
Focusing on Brussels, the research project WELCOMIN* aims to explore long-lasting forms of shared governance and ownership to overcome the fragile conditions of many civic initiatives legally framed as temporary occupations. The working hypothesis at the core of this project is that many of these, maintained by the communities for the communities, interweaving care practices for the human and the non-human, represent a welfare infrastructure towards what I define as ecological welfare, the word “ecological” being meant in the sense of the deep ecology (Naess, 1973).
During the first year of the research project, the hypothesis of shared governance has been applied to a few highly contested sites, whose future is debated between the opportunity of spontaneous regeneration of nature and wilderness on the one hand; and the need to address crucial issues such as developing strategic infrastructures or tackling the housing question on the other hand (Lenna 2024). A prospective, scenario-based approach using research-by-design to explore the potentials of shared governance has been combined with a comparative framework. The purpose of such a hybrid methodology is to support and complete the visionary component of the scenario approach with the pragmatic knowledge and the hands-on expertise of actors from other European cities well known in the literature and amongst practitioners for their innovative experiments of shared governance (Lenna 2025).
The paper aims to illustrate these research results, learning from the cities of Naples and Barcelona to identify both supportive and less favourable conditions for shared governance in Brussels while pointing out site-specific and political variations on the theme.
*WELCOMIN is the acronym for “Community Welfare Mixed Infrastructures. Reclaiming vacancy, federating capacities and empowering
communities towards an ecological welfare”, a project funded by the Brussels Capital Region research funding entity Innoviris, in the
framework of the Prospective research programme.
References
References
Lenna, V (2024) Brussels 2033. The eco-resilient city, WELCOMIN Research report, available at https://welcomin.brussels
Lenna, V (2025) The scientific role of imagination. Discussing benefits and limitations of research-by-design and comparative
frameworks as part of a prospective approach. AAG Annual Meeting, Detroit, 24-28 March 2025.
Naess, A. (1973) ‘The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement. A summary’, Inquiry, 16, pp. 95–100.
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
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