Speaker
Description
This paper traces the changing role and conceptualisation of social infrastructure in Brussels’ urban planning tradition, paying particular attention to the interactions and power dynamics between the planners, policymakers, and citizens involved. We will examine whether and how these actors have thought about social infrastructure as a category and included it in plans, as well as what the underlying power dynamics and visions were that shaped these decisions. Scholars see social infrastructure as a lever for dealing with global crises at the urban level (Klinenberg, 2018; Latham & Layton, 2022), although this same infrastructure also risks worsening crises by reinforcing inequities or upholding existing power relations (Horton & Penny, 2023). To prevent such adverse effects, the planning process of social infrastructure needs to efficiently involve a wide variety of actors at different scales, fostering generative conflict to drive transformative change that addresses both global challenges and local community needs. By improving our understanding of the evolving ways in which social infrastructure has been approached in Brussels’ urban planning since the creation of the Brussels Capital Region in 1989, this paper intends to provide insights into how planning systems in general could be adjusted to enable transformative change. Empirically, the paper (i) reviews existing literature about the history of planning in Brussels (Carlier et al., 2022; Levy, 2015; Vermeulen, 2015) to map historical trends, (ii) analyses how social infrastructure is approached and discussed in municipal and regional policy and planning documents, (iii) reports on semi-structured interviews with planners, policymakers, activists, and academics to gain insight into underlying power dynamics, (iv) and reconstructs the public debate on social infrastructure by consulting the archives of Brussels-based social movements as well as major news sources.
References
Carlier, L., Grulois, G., Moritz, B., & Varloteaux, P. (2022). L’espace des infrastructures sociales: Une histoire (bruxelloise) de l’urbanisme de proximité. Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique.
Horton, A., & Penny, J. (2023). Towards a Political Economy of Social Infrastructure: Contesting “Anti-Social Infrastructures” in London. Antipode, 55 (6), pp. 1711–1734.
Klinenberg, E. (2018). Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. New York: Crown.
Latham, A., & Layton, J. (2022). Social infrastructure: Why it matters and how urban geographers might study it. Urban Geography, 43 (5), pp. 659–668.
Levy, S. (2015). La planification sans le plan: Règles et régulation de l’aménagement du territoire bruxellois. Brussels: ASP.
Vermeulen, S. (2015). The Brussels Canal Zone: Negotiating visions for urban planning (1st edition). Brussels: ASP.
| Keywords | Planning system; social infrastructure; actors; collaboration; scale |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
