Brussels Studies Institute (BSI)

Co-resilience raise issues of democratic governance of neighbourghoods and cities and the co-resilient practices often weave new social, material, and technical threads into their fabrics.

The nature of processes of collaboration and co-production entailed by these practices necessitate new governance models and forms of organisation within the multiple actors involved and the diverse methods used in their activities.  These can vary from more autonomous to more (inter)dependent, always privileging the control of stakeholders on processes of decision-making. 

At the same time, in order to forge viable alternatives, there is a need to overcome the assumption that local decision-making is inherent to the most socially and ecologically just forms of collective governance. Many grassroots resilience initiatives tend to fall into this ‘local trap’, due precisely to their vulnerability to scarce resources and inward looking organisational models.  To address this issue, it is important to foster trans-local relations between sites of experimentation and create opportunities for sharing local ‘resourcefulness’ which could support other groups and projects, sustaining wider collective processes of enhancing urban resilience.

In addition to stakeholders, policy makers have a role in supporting democratic forms of governance within co-resilience processes.  In absence of supporting national and international laws, charters, agreements, rules and regulations can be co-produced locally and trans-locally to follow emerging needs in new projects. It is very often that conflicts arise in collective projects which are not governed by consensual agreement only. Conflict is not always a negative factor, because it catalyses communities capacity to transform rules of governance by challenging and rearticulating their means of living together with their differences.

The lesson will address some of these questions in dialogue with CLT Brussels, which is a solidarity network of self-organised housing initiatives, recombining individually own housing, and common land ownership with new social and technical tools to support solidarity within stakeholders.