Editors: Aurelie De Smet, Burak Pak, Geraldine Bruyneel, Tineke Van Heesvelde

The SMH project is an experimental venture into potentially innovative resilient housing models. Considering that for many vulnerable citizens, stable and quality housing is the first step towards recovery, SMH aims at co-creating a new model in a living environment with real users and trace the social and spatial impact of this practice.

Including the users in every step of the conceptualization and the construction of their own houses, SMH empowers the future inhabitants to incrementally co-create a solidary living community in interaction with the surrounding neighbourhood. A parallel aim of the SMH is to envision alternative modalities of appropriation of underused spaces.

Together with the future inhabitants, the non-profit organizations; Samenlevingsopbouw Brussels and Centrum Algemeen Welzijnswerk (CAW) Brussels, the students and Professors from the Faculty of Architecture of KU Leuven reframed a Waiting Space in Esseghem, Brussels as a ‘place of negotiation’ and transformed it into a project through which questions about the city are raised, a place where experimentation and innovation take place. The project was funded by INNOVIRIS Co-create program.