Solidary Appropriation of Urban Waiting Spaces

Research by Aurelie De Smet (advisors: Burak Pak and Yves Schoonjans)

|| Previous research has shown that practices of Temporary Use of Waiting Spaces can play an important role in the redevelopment of the city and offer an alternative approach to the creation of collective spaces. However, as practices of temporary use are becoming more and more common, new questions are now rising e.g. on which users are entitled to claiming these spaces, previously neglected by the mainstream urban actors and therefore pre-eminently available to alternative, more fragile actors.

Throughout this PhD - based on interaction between experience and research in the Living Lab context of the Solidary Mobile Housing project currently being carried out by the Faculty of Architecture of the KU Leuven - we want to learn how temporary use of Waiting Spaces can be put into practice in a co-creative manner through solidary appropriation, with the aim of increasing urban resilience. Also, we want to understand the consequences of this for the domain of architecture and urbanism.

Keywords: Keywords: temporary use, Waiting Spaces, Solidary Mobile Housing, co-creation, transdisciplinarity