Solidary Mobile Housing

This project involves a long-term participatory Participatory Action Research aimed at developing, testing, and refining a model and prototype for the co-creation of solidary living in mobile homes on un(der)used urban spaces in the Brussels-Capital Region.

In the context of Solidary Mobiel Housing (SMH), from 2017 until today, a group of eight future inhabitants has been working closely together with employees of the Brussels civil society organisations SAAMO and CAW, students, teachers and researchers from the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, and several professional and governmental actors from the Brussels-Capital Region in the SMH Living Lab.
Within this context, I was co-responsible for scaffolding the trans-disciplinary and cross-sectoral collaboration of all the partners and the end-users in the SMH Living Lab and for capturing, processing, and disseminating the collectively produced knowledge.

The SMH project proposal was based on SAAMO’s previous experiences in the context of temporary housing for people in precarious housing conditions, the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture’s earlier research on participatory and inclusive design, temporary use of waiting spaces and alternative urban projects, and CAW’s know-how on the guidance of vulnerable citizens, and specifically home- and houseless people. The overarching aim of this ongoing trans-disciplinary and cross-sectoral research project is to explore how the spatial development of the Brussels-Capital Region (BCR) could be made more resilient and inclusive, and democracy in the housing sector could be improved. Concretely, the SMH project has four distinct objectives: (1) developing co-design and co-creation processes focused on empowering the involved stakeholders, (2) designing a mobile and modular housing typology, (3) creating and strengthening small-scale solidarity networks in interaction with the immediate urban environment and (4) involving vulnerable people in the discussion on the temporary use of urban waiting spaces. The underlying hypothesis behind the SMH project is that taking part in every step of the conceptualisation and construction of their own houses – besides enabling them to build their own individual housing units – also empowers homeless people to gradually create a solidary living community in interactions with the surrounding neighbourhood. And that through this, they can regain a grip, not only on their own housing track but also on their whole life. Consequently, the SMH project involved a far-reaching Participatory Action Research process, involving the end-users throughout the entire process, alongside several other partners from society, academia, business, and the government.

The results of the SMH project were the co-development of the Solidary Mobile Housing Model (a housing co-creation method incorporating social guidance and skill-building methods and tools, a service-learning methodology, and preliminary financial and legal strategies), the SMH Architectural Design System (a mobile and modular construction system consisting of structural modules, sanitary modules, interchangeable facade panels, and a flexible inner wall system), and the SMH Pilot Project (a first SMH community consisting of eight housing units and a collective space, surrounded by a (semi-) public landscape. Currently, the SMH Partners are investigating how the SMH project could be upscaled to SMH 2.0: a dual-purpose social enterprise for affordable, modular, and inclusive transitional housing that aims at realizing societal impact with a for-profit business model.

More info:

https://solidhomes.be/ (vitual exhibition)
https://solidairmobielwonen.be/ (project website)