Reconceptualizing the “Publicness” of Public Housing: The Case of Brussels

Abstract

This article brings together various spatial and political theorizations on the commons as a broader project to understand multiple dimensions of the inclusive nature of public housing. By picking up theorizations on the commons, the article feeds the debate on the loss of "publicness" of public housing and removes attention from what is seen as a state related business. Four core-dimensions are identified: ownership, participation, community activity and physical configuration. The article takes a sample of public housing estates in the Brussels capital region as case studies to test the capacity of this framework to detect the degree of "publicness" of various forms of public housing. The preliminary results-based on this limited sample of cases studied through interviews with privileged informers and a literature study-suggest that approaches where individual households are actively involved in the organization of the dwelling environment work best to compensate for the loss of "publicness" that has occurred since the decline of the welfare state. In that respect, these approaches tie in with some early predecessors of "public" housing, mainly cooperatively organized garden city developments. Further in-depth case study research should shed more light on the validity of this hypothesis, as well as on the precise mechanisms and features that determine this regained "publicness".

Collaborative Housing in Europe: Conceptualizing the Field

“…As the papers in this SI show, the expanding variety of recent CH projects, and their interactions with public authorities, call for research on their effects in line with welfare transformations. In this regard, Aernouts and Ryckewaert (2015) use the notion of "publicness" to qualify initiatives that are not provided anymore by the state but take place in the "public sphere" and carry out "public" tasksfor example some housing cooperatives where households are actively involved in the organization of their living environment. Another example is the work by Semprebon and Vicari (2016), which evokes the possible emergence of an "active welfare" when analysing self-build experiments in Italy, while Droste (2015) shed lights on new "intelligent collaboration between self-organisation and local welfare policies" in Berlin, calling for a "more community organised welfare" (Droste 2015, 90).…”

Research on the Evaluation and Influence Mechanism of Public Housing Service Quality: A Case Study of Shanghai

“…The performance evaluation of public housing services can only evaluate its "obvious quality" rather than its "latent quality". Performance measurement may focus on input and output indicators, which makes it difficult to simultaneously meet the requirements of standardization and variability [25], and also hard to reflect the essential connotations of fairness, social justice, and government interactions with the public when providing public services and implementing public policies [26]. The basic value pursuit of public services is in fairness rather than efficiency, and the particularity of public services requires not only the measurement of quantity but also of quality [27].…”

Contemporary Spatial Publicness: Its New Characteristics and Democratic Possibilities

“…Traditional boundaries of public and private spaces are becoming increasingly ambiguous [1][2][3]. Direct provision of services (i.e., management) by the public sector is being replaced by various hybrid schemes between the public and private sectors.…”