Skip to content
Loading Events

Agenda

Brussels Studies Institute (BSI)

Chair BSI-citydev.brussels 2023 – Lesson 2: Infrastructures & Tools

Co-resilience needs infrastructures, designs and tools to enable civic agency.

Infrastructure is commonly understood as the fundamental physical and organisational structures and systems that keep our societies running (such as streets, water pipes, train tracks, electric wires, and housing or critical societal functions and regulatory frameworks related to health/wellbeing and environmental care). In terms of Co-resilience, infrastructure could also mean the socio-material frameworks that emerge through practices of cooperation, being accessible to the inhabitants of a city.

The co-production of an infrastructure for co-resilience has potential to bring diverse communities of practice together, grow people’s sense of mutual agency, and foster collective stewardship. Beyond public provision, such infrastructures can also be self-organised and built with the collective wealth of skills, knowledges, resources, energy, and care people contribute. In both material and immaterial infrastructures for co-resilience, access should remain open and porous and sustained by the relational and reciprocal practices that it enables.  The co-production of these infrastructures is a continuous and relational process — a process of “infrastructuring” — that requires an ongoing ethics of care and negotiation.  Infrastructuring could also mean “the creation of possibilities for stakeholders to create their own solutions”, that could be anything from tools and physical spaces to shared rules and protocols, which allow them to face complex and evolving problems by building confidence, skills, and political agency. 

Although the number of small-scale co-resilience experiments has increased in the recent years, only very few projects seem to have the means (e.g. spatial, financial, know-how, legal and technical) and to become sustainable in the long-term, to scale up or acquire strategic capacities to transform the systems in which they operate .

Using a number of concrete examples, this lesson will focus on the notion of infrastructuring co-resilience and the tools for supporting such process.  

As a way of situating the discussion, we will invite the Brussels-based group Rotor to present their approach to tools and infrastructures for co-resilience.

Date

14 Mar 23

Heure

de 12:00 à 13:30

Tarif

Lieu

LUCA School of Arts

Scroll To Top