About Permanent

Permanent is a practice-based research and grassroot infrastructural project that draws upon anti-speculative models from the commons- and cooperative economy to develop a cultural infrastructure in Brussels that combines cultural functions with affordable housing and community spaces.

Permanent Brussels was founded in 2018 and went through a first active phase of development in between 2019 and 2022, driven by the artist studio cooperative Level Five and the other core partners Globe Aroma, VUB and Community Land Trust Brussels. In this period, Permanent focused on the Fire Station of the city of Brussels in the Northern Quarter, that will be vacated in the upcoming years with the move of the fire brigade. A series of workshops, facilitated by a group of Brussels architects, and with the support of the Bouwmeesterlabel, led to a series of scenarios reclaiming the Fire Station for a mixed-use, land trust-based infrastructural project. This is also the subject of a publication launched in 2024.

In 2023, the focus reshifted towards supportive academic research, broadening the scope of Permanent towards various 'community welfare institutions' in the WELCOMIN research of VUB, supported by Innoviris.

In the course of 2025, Permanent will resurface with a new scenario tailored to another empty public property in Brussels, with a new set of partners and actors.

Basic premises of Permanent

Shared community land against speculation

Central to Permanent is the Community Land Trust or CLT ownership model. The CLT-model has already demonstrated its capacity in many different places worldwide to include a larger and more diverse group of people in the development of an urban living environment beneficial for all, but is mainly used for the development of housing. Permanent now wants to apply the model for the development of a cultural infrastructure.

The main principle of the CLT-ownership model is its division of the ownership of land and building: the land remains collective property of the community whereas the buildings on it can be acquired individually. Without the cost of the land, the buildings are much more affordable. And they remain affordable in the long run: owners can re-sell their properties but not with profit. As such, the CLT-model proposes an innovative public-private partnership that effectively cancels out financial speculation.

Solidarity not competition

As artists and art organisations are often unwantedly put in competition with other groups in need for affordable space in the city, Permanent consciously opts for the development of a mixed-use infrastructure. Permanent wants to reclaim the symbolic capital of the arts to also make space for other groups and functions that risk to be pushed out of the city centres. Therefore, Permanent puts forward a mixed building programme that combines artistic workspaces with affordable homes for newcomers and large families with limited means, an educational infrastructure and community- and safe space facilities. As such, Permanent aims to install new regimes of solidarity and commoning between different users, partners and functions, and avoid for culture and cultural infrastructures to serve as flagships for gentrification and profit-driven real estate development.

Grounded in a community

Through a bottom-up and collective approach, Permanents also includes local networks and communities in the development of the site in their neighbourhood. A part of the building programme is determined through a participatory trajectory. This allows Permanent to respond to local needs and aspirations, genuinely grounding the project in its "quartier" in Brussels.

2019-2022: Helihaven Fire Station

In this period, Permanent organized a series of workshops, a summer school and work tables that both zoomed in and zoomed out on the development of the envisioned mixed-use infrastructure.

Zooming in, this trajectory focused on concrete decision-making around the building programme, partnerships and their modes of engagement while laying the ground work for Permanent's governance, ownership and financial model. These exercises focused on a number of sites but put forward the Fire Station in the Helihavenlaan in Brussels' North Quarter as a pivotal site to explore and campaign on.

This grassroot trajectory followed a bottom-up approach that departs from the collaborative intelligence, needs and aspirations of a diverse group of partners, users, and local networks. It sought to develop a site as a collective effort in which a multitude of voices are acknowledged, namely those voices often overlooked or deemed irrelevant. In this conversation, Permanent attempted to question and reimagine how we live, work and learn (together) under a shared roof, from a diverse, intersectional perspective.

Parallel but not detached from this line of action we also zoomed out by developing and exchanging knowledge and insights about the complex social, urban, architectural, and legal conditions determining Permanent. Through a research by design approach, we also looked into the specific spatial implications of commoning space between different partners and users. We paired academic with architectural, activist and grassroot knowledge around the case of Permanent to also contribute to broader discussions on urban commons, while also questioning the universality of the notion of the common and engaging with issues of spatial inequality and injustice.

This trajectory was realized in close collaboration with VUB/Cosmopolis/Brussels Centre for Urban Studies and a group of Brussels-based architects.

Working structure

In its first iteration, Permanent had a core team facilitated by two coördinators that ensure the continuity of the project together with the core partners VUB/we.KONEKT.brussels, VUB/Cosmopolis, Community Land Trust Brussels (CLTB), Globe Aroma and Level Five/Hactiris coalition of artists. In addition, there were a changing constellation of work groups, some for specific actions, others for developing more long term projects or enduring tasks. There is a monthly meeting the last Monday of the month open to anyone interested. In these meetings each group gives an update of their progress in the previous month and different tasks and lines of action are drafted for the coming month.

From 2023, the continuity of Permanent is insured via Welcomin at VUB, led by Verena Lenna, Arshia Ali Azmat, Bas Van Heur, Nele Aernouts and Els Silvrants-Barclay.