The project of property as emancipation. A Community Land Trust in Brussels

On the background of growing privatisation of resources, of the incapacity of both private and public forms of arrangements to protect them, other forms of governing the resources and building welfare are emerging. This dissertation questions the emancipatory role of property under the current circumstances: under which conditions can property be emancipatory? My hypothesis is that the different ways of owning currently being experimented by many practices as the rising discourse on the commons for example, in alternative to private and public forms of property- suggest the possibility of a third turn of the relationship between property and emancipation. Beyond the exclusivity of private property, beyond the redistributive logic of the public though not implying the obscuration of these two models. The Community Land Trust, officially established in Brussels in 2013 (CLTB), is an example of those practices and the case study of this dissertation. My thesis is that the architectural and urban project have a paramount role in realising the form of governing resources aka property- implied in that model. The double engagement as an activist in Commons Josaphat and as an architect contributing to the realisation of one of the first projects of the CLTB Le Nid- allowed me to develop an ethnographic approach, which in fact proved to be essential in order to address the topic of emancipation. The immersed position allowed me to seize the thick fabric of relationships and the accumulation of capacities which led to the establishment of the CLT in one of the poorest municipalities of the Brussels Capital Region, as an answer to an unsolved housing question, unbearable in particular for numerous and low income households. It allowed me to learn about the values, rights and needs of the involved inhabitants and local actors and to reconstruct a history of emancipation of a whole community, one among many possible others. At the core of the CLTB, I argue property is reconceived beyond the right to access: on the base of the recognition of the right and capacities of the concerned communities to decide, to take care and to govern the resources they need for the fulfilment of their basic needs, for the development of their life strategies. In other words, for their emancipation. The other side of the right to decide and of recognition is responsibility. Responsabilization being in this case a collective endeavour and not an alienating process, condemning individuals to rely only on la propriété de soi. By referring to my direct implication in the design process of the project Le Nid, I argue space matters and the project as a process -as a unique characteristic of the Belgian form of CLT-has a paramount role in envisioning what the jurist Steiner would define the set of compossibilities: by assembling compatible needs and rights; by redefining them in relation to the spatial limitations; by balancing the spatial configuration with the actual capacities of the inhabitants and concerned communities to take care of their living environment and resources. On these grounds, because of a project centred on the concrete capacities of the concerned communities to contribute to the common good, property would be emancipatory: being about the right to decide and recognition as much as about responsibility and the long term protection of resources.