ATLAS - Access To sheLter And Social infrastructure for people with precarious residency status in Brussels
Thousands of migrants in Brussels live in a situation of precarious citizenship. This leads to an impasse for these people themselves, but also for the Brussels government, which has to engage in permanent crisis management.
In ATLAS, we analyse this 'crisis' in Brussels together with all actors involved, including people with precarious citizenship themselves. We develop different scenarios to arrive at a different kind of citizenship, ensuring the right to shelter and services for all.
ATLAS of housing scenarios
Today Brussels, like many other global cities, faces a double socio-technical lock-in in the field of asylum and migration:
- a large and variegated group of up to 100.000 people is literally socio-spatially locked-in in the capital without clear future perspectives nor legitimate means of movement due to their precarious citizenship;
- at the same time, due to the effects of national migration governance, the Brussels government is not able to act beyond mere crisis-management as migration and asylum are national competencies.
This double lock-in combined with the deep political sensitivities around migration tend to result in a paralyzing effect, leading cities like Brussels to face “a crisis of imagination”.
ATLAS (Access To sheLter And Social infrastructure) endeavors to open up this multi-layered crisis by exploring, mapping out and designing in detail how a multi-scalar urban government like Brussels could, via the building and providing of housing and social infrastructure, rewrite the precarious citizenship of an increasing number of people in its city.
Brussels-based co-creation lab
Three years of intensive fieldwork in Brussels into the often hidden ‘infrastructuring work’ of a multitude of actors in this domain will lead to an ATLAS of scenarios in which diverse forms of provisioning housing and social infrastructure can rewrite the precarious citizenship of people.
The ATLAS-team of anthropologists, architects, urban planners, geographers and social workers (supported by a think-tank of local and international experts) will co-produce fine-grained, yet open-ended scenarios with a variety of local and international stakeholders in a multi-disciplinary and Brussels-based co-creation lab.
The resulting ATLAS will be exhibited in a number of Brussels’ public centres and will be made available online in order to boost the urgently required dialogue and rewriting of precarious citizenship in Brussels.
Partners in dit project
KU Leuven:
- Departement Sociale & Culturele Antropologie
- Departement Architectuur – Urban Design, Urbanism, Landscape & Planning (UULP)
- KU Leuven Urban Studies Institute (LUSI)
Met de steun van: Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest – Innoviris
