An ethnography of private houseboats and public fluvial areas in Belgium.

Daffe, Laurie
(2016) Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers — Location: San Francisco (29.March.2016)

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  • Daffe, LaurieUCLouvain
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Abstract
The communication will be based on an ethnographic work conducted with private houseboats inhabitants of public fluvial areas in Belgium. In the French speaking part of the country, more than 100 people live on the water, and waiting lists to get an ‘official’ location are 3 years long. In this paper, I will focus on the ambiguous ties - symbolic and material - that this phenomenon entails. Even though they established their homes in former commercial barges, these rivers occupants are not bargemen. Despite that, their discourse is infused with recurring representations such as long distance journeys, or the possibility to move their homes whenever they wish. But by their own admission most of them do not know how to navigate and even transformed their ships according to their permanent mooring place… However, the roots of fluvial housing in Belgium are directly fed by the inland water shipping history: the decrease of industrial activities and the simultaneous boost in road transportation reinforced the lack of interest for the fluvial structures and their surroundings, therefore abandoned for a long while. It is there, at the margins of cities that groups of fluvial inhabitants began to tie their moors, pitch their fences and plant their gardens. They turned their noses up at land-based borders and anchored themselves in the interstices of fluvial regulations. But now that waterfronts are meant to be the new hubs for big and upper-middle-class housing schemes, a new light is shed on them. Not always for the best…
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Daffe, L. (2016). An ethnography of private houseboats and public fluvial areas in Belgium. Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, San Francisco. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/47644