Supporting the Upcycling Trust Project: A Researcher’s Perspective
The following contribution was written by Jeanne Mosseray, PhD Researcher at Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research as a contribution to the upcoming webinar on”Using CLTs to Deliver Energy Renovation and Permanent Affordability to Existing Housing” on 25 September.
As an academic researcher on housing for the Upcycling Trust project, I support the implementing partners by offering critical reflections and perspectives on the initiatives we are developing. Our goal is to renovate existing housing stock in various contexts, including Brussels, Lille, Ghent, Cork, and Rennes by applying the community land trust model. This approach involves collaborating with current owners of the existing housing stock to explore architectural, technical, and financial scenarios for renovation, which may include changing the ownership model.
Challenges in Diverse Contexts
From my perspective, an important challenge of the project is managing the diversity of contexts across different regions. While as a collective project, we aim to develop a new European model for housing renovation that addresses the housing crisis, the ownership situation in each context requires us to invent and promote different tools of implementation. For example, in France, our partners from Rennes and Lille face national policies aimed at reducing and therefore selling the social housing stock in need of renovation which pushes them toward larger and more institutional solutions. Meanwhile, in Belgium and Ireland—Community Land Trust Brussels (CLTB), Community Land Trust Ghent (CLTG), Cork Community Land Trust (CCLT)—the project is supported by smaller innovative structures who propose more localized, “acupuncture” solutions as they conceive the model’s potential for large-scale application. In terms of community- and capacity-building, the second approach is more inclined and better equipped to involve local stakeholders.Despite the diversity of contexts, some challenges are universally relevant in a broader debate on housing renovation and affordable housing.
Community-Building Across a Scattered Territory
One of the major challenges for CLTB and CLTG is creating or strengthening a community across a scattered territory. In both contexts, the two organizations have been building their communities around the vision of a fairer and anti-speculative city. In practice, they could count on creating groups of residents who collectively built housing projects within shared buildings. This sense of community, centered on co-living, is less present in the Upcycling Trust project. In many exemplary or inspiring renovation projects we have come across, renovations often occur at the scale of a building, street, block, or neighborhood. In the Upcycling Trust project, some pilots (Lille, Rennes, and Cork) can leverage this spatial proximity to build a community. At this stage of the project, the scale and the territorial focus are already key aspects that influence the initial contact with residents, raising the question: how do we begin engaging with homeowners?
The Origin of the Initiative
The project partners can be broadly classified into two categories: (1) housing departments of regional or municipal authorities and (2) associative organizations. The two approaches explain the two different approaches toward community building. The more institutional partners aim to develop a large quantity of housing, while the associative organizations, with less resources, develop their projects at a pace aligned with their means and the community’s needs.
Even though the first approach could be classified as “top-down” and the second as “bottom-up,” both approaches require engaging the homeowner or occupant, as none of the pilots started with the residents themselves. This process of involvement which we currently define as “convincing” and “informing about the benefits of the model,” will be central to our work. We can imagine that the language and approach will evolve and adapt through ongoing dialogue with homeowner-occupants.
Homeowner or Public Social Housing into CLTs
A last important challenge for the Upcycling Trust project is the varied audience and the owners each context addresses. A common denominator of the model is to address existing built environments/dwellings, but home tenure varies greatly. If the final result aims at extending or maintaining the anti-speculative stock in cities, the process of involving a public, multi-owner entity or a myriad of private owners will require different methods, stakeholders, and renovation strategies. It also poses an ethical question about the future residents of these newly renovated homes who are, by default, included in the privately-owned pilots, whereas retaining the current tenants in place during renovation will add in another layer of complexity.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.