Temporary Housing Projects

Example

• In Brussels, Belgium: Comuna

Discussion

(Translated from the French, in EnCommuns)

By Sébastien Broca and Corinne Vercher-Chaptal:

"In major cities or their close peripheries, we are witnessing the development of projects that occupy vacant or underused spaces: industrial or railway sites in the process of transformation, former public facilities (hospitals, schools), office or residential buildings, vacant commercial surfaces, or leftover urban spaces. Their multiplication over the past twenty years in France and Europe has given rise to a new category of housing, labeled temporary housing – or transitional housing. The projects that fall under this label host a plurality of activities: low-cost workspaces (coworking, fab labs), artistic and cultural activities, commercial activities, emergency accommodation, or urban agriculture initiatives.

This form of temporary housing, as it is now unfolding, originates in a movement that began in the 1970s: the spontaneous occupation of derelict spaces, often driven by necessity. This movement was carried by collectives of artists looking for places to create and/or present their work, sometimes in a legal framework and sometimes through squatting. Over years of temporary occupations, these self-managed artistic collectives acquired mastery of all the tasks needed to deploy their occupation projects: bringing buildings up to code, allocating spaces and uses, day-to-day management of the site, outreach to local stakeholders, responses to calls for projects. In doing so, they transformed a militant and alternative experience into professional know-how. Research has thus suggested considering the functioning of these collectives and “their” self-managed buildings as “infrastructure commons,” showing how these are placed at the service of an artistic professionalism that operates at the margins of the traditional art market.

For the past fifteen years or so, in an urban context characterized by strong real estate pressure and a growing need for accessible work and leisure spaces for young adults and/or people in precarious situations, temporary occupation practices have sparked enthusiasm among “classic” urban planning and environmental actors, who promote a new notion: temporary urbanism. In this context, public and private commissioning has been growing, through the provision of sites and the search for operators to manage and activate them. A new market is emerging, in which pre-existing activist collectives find themselves in competition not only with professionals from the fields of urban planning and real estate who are positioning themselves in this segment, but also with organisations from the social and solidarity economy (SSE) and social entrepreneurship that specialize in temporary occupation.

These new professionals play a brokerage role between public or private owners of vacant buildings and users seeking spaces at costs lower than those of the conventional property market. They also organize the entry and exit of occupants within the timeframes contractually agreed with the owner (temporary occupation agreements, precarious leases, etc.). These intermediation professionals contribute directly to the spread of temporary occupation practices and to the structuring of a new market, within which they broaden their functions: supporting projects through advisory or project management mandates, running and managing sites, opening them to the general public, and so forth.

Research on the development of temporary urbanism in Paris and its inner suburbs has shown that the structuring of this new field generates tensions. These arise from differences in values, representations, and ambitions associated with temporary uses of space, between the new professionals in the for-profit and/or SSE sectors and the historical or associative actors. For the latter, the growth of intermediation makes exchanges between collectives and owners more complex and slows down the search for sites suited to their needs. They also stress that there is a risk of standardizing temporary projects themselves, through the application of the same “recipes” by a small number of large intermediary actors. A form of competition thus appears between actors—economic, ideological, but also spatial—through the issue of access to new vacant spaces.

The institutionalization of a field of temporary occupation raises real questions in terms of the development of possible urban commons. In cities, intermediaries enable a diversity of actors (artistic, cultural, associative, social) to come together in vacant spaces, to build links (more or less lasting), and to decide on the uses of a place according to their respective needs. Nevertheless, the activity of these intermediaries introduces third parties into the dynamics of self-institution of the commons, with the risk of weakening the collectives’ ability to decide on strategies for occupying sites. Whatever the nature of the actors involved, the intermediation function between space owners (private or public) and resident communities directly interrogates the notion of the commons, insofar as the communities’ self-organization can never be complete. Intermediaries define a framework and intervene—more or less depending on the case—in the organization, governance, management, and securing of spaces.

Caught between opportunities for new markets and support for new commons, between activist practices and entrepreneurial approaches, temporary occupation practices are therefore far from unified. As an “evolving object,” temporary housing is particularly difficult to grasp. It is shaped by a great diversity of actors (public authorities, social entrepreneurs, social work organizations, activist associations, etc.) who—despite very different identities and statuses—regularly cooperate within temporary projects.

This was true of the Grands Voisins experience in Paris from 2015 to 2020. In Marseille, several projects for temporary, collective, and participatory living spaces are based on alliances that bring together a large number of functions (financing, project engineering, spatial transformation and governance, solidarity-based concierge services, expertise in social innovation, replication and capitalization, medico-social support, etc.) and a constellation of actors. As Jean Régis Rooijakers, coordinator of the association JUST, explains: “We create unprecedented and unlikely alliances with actors such as Yes We Camp and Nouvelle Aube – Parisians and ‘punks with dogs’.”

What do the practices of temporary housing actors, and the alliances they form to implement them, tell us about the possibility—or impossibility—of fostering the emergence and development of urban commons and solidarity-based neighborhoods? Where is the common (or commons) located within these large projects that bring together so many actors?"