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--- title: About --- ## What is Permanent? Permanent is a practice-based research with the aim to develop a mixed and shared use infrastructure for permanently affordable and embedded social and cultural space in Brussels. By investigating alternative understandings of ownership and by looking into new legal and financial models proposed by cooperatives and other “commoning” initiatives, Permanent wants to develop this much-needed infrastructure in Brussels without contributing to a process of gentrification and profit-driven urban development. We are currently bringing forward the Community Land Trust-model (CLT) as an alternative. CLT is a social real estate development model in which the land remains collective property of the community. The model has already demonstrated its capacity in many different places to include a larger and more diverse group of people in the development of an urban living environment beneficial for all. Permanent therefore also strives for radical solidarity and collaboration with other groups excluded by speculative urban development schemes. It proposes a building programme that complements artistic workspaces with public and safe space infrastructure as well as affordable homes for people with limited means, installing new regimes of solidarity outside of the own group. This way, Permanent aims to contribute in a pro-active and sustainable manner to the urban city life in Brussels. ## The campaign Permanent will develop a public campaign around a couple crucial sites in Brussels. We indicated these sites as exemplary for a potential anti-speculative, mixed use, and social equitable urban development. The campaign will put to use artistic practices to undertake interventions in the public space and opinion with the aim to interrupt and question current processes of development. In this way we hope to open up space and time to imagine and experiment with bottom-up alternatives. Paralelel but not detached from this line of action we will develop our knowledge about these complex social, urban, architectural, financial and legal constallations by setting up, hosting and activating a knowledge pool of specialists in each of these fields. With these specialist we will organize several workshops on ownership, legal and financial models in order to formulate some tools that can be used in common. ## Label As a project that started from artist cooperative searching for workspaces in Brussels, Permanent will develop a label that indicates to what extend a specific current occupation of this cooperative reaches the goals of Permanent. The artist cooperative would like to fulfill the necessary need for qualitative and affordable workspaces for artists in Brussels. For this the cooperative is dependent on temporary occupations of different durations in privately and public owned properties. The artists confident of the positive role it can play in the city but is also aware of the possible utilization of its organisation in gentrification and city promotion schemes. To make this apparent Permanent will develop a label to indicate the measure to which the current occupations contributes to anti-speculative urban development, to what extend it applies a mixed use programme in the occupation, and if the occupation contributes to a more equitable social space. In this way Permanent serves as a quality label as well as an critical tool to promote more radical steps in the development of a Permanent location in Brussels. ## As a working structure Permanent has a core team that ensures the continuity of the project. In addition there is 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.
