Conceptualizing Third Sector-Driven Alternative Housing Initiatives: Insights from the Brussels In-Between Housing Landscape

Abstract

In recent years, a great number of alternative housing initiatives (AHIs) have emerged in Brussels as a response to the lack of affordable and qualitative housing. While many are explicitly recognized by and in close partnership with a governmental entity or have emerged within grass-roots housing activism, others fall somewhere in between. Such in-between initiatives are marked by their reliance on the non-profit sector and by their linkages to both public and private actors. Despite the vast emergence of such initiatives in Brussels, little focus has been given to how these more hybrid shapes of housing provision and their actors link with each other and are impacted by the landscape in which they are embedded. By adopting an exploratory take based on the development of a series of maps serving as a tool of critical enquiry along with semi-structured interviews with housing professionals, this contribution attempts to unravel third sector-driven AHIs as a network within the overall housing landscape. Findings uncover the structure of the network surrounding such initiatives, its primary components as well as some underlying themes that depict the hybrid, in-between nature of these initiatives.

Image: AHIs and their supportive actors grouped in thematic clusters. © Aikaterini Anastasiou, 2023.