From existential tests to concrete utopias: institutional change through occupations conflicts in Brussels

de Briey, Olivia
(2025) Contested urban policy : breeding concrete utopias, AESOP Planning/Conflict thematic group conference — Location: Berlin (30.September.2025)

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In Brussels, the occupation of empty buildings has become a highly contested terrain, revealing deep-seated tensions around legitimate uses of urban vacancies. Two antagonistic normative frameworks coexist and confront each other. On one side, contestation-based occupations, rooted in the history of squatting, position occupation as an act of resistance and a claim for housing rights and the "right to the city" (Lefebvre, 1968; Harvey, 2012; Aguilera & Bouillon, 2013; Martínez, 2019). These occupations emphasize collective autonomy, self-management, and the critique of dominant modes of urban governance. On the other side, managerial occupations, formalized through temporary use agreements, have been integrated into urban development strategies as tools for managing vacancies, fostering entrepreneurship, and valorizing real estate (Ferreri, 2015; Pinard & Vivant, 2017; Tonkiss, 2013). Often framed as forms of "transitional urbanism" (Adisson, 2017; Kamvasinou, 2017), these practices are promoted by public and private actors to experiment with urban functions while retaining property control. This confrontation gives rise to ongoing disputes over what constitutes a "legitimate" or "justifiable" occupation, exposing the underlying normative and political divergences. In this contribution, I draw on Luc Boltanski’s sociology of critique to explore how such conflicts are potential sites of institutional transformation. According to Boltanski (2009), critique emerges through existential tests (épreuves existentielles), situations where actors publicly expose the incompleteness and fragility of institutional arrangements, making visible the possibility of alternative orders. These moments can destabilize dominant regimes of justification, open pathways for institutional change, and contribute to the prefiguration of urban utopias understood as situated, collective enactments of the “not-yet” within the here and now (Davoudi, 2023). By investigating how existential tests unfold within these conflicts, I aim to understand how critique enhances institutional and political reconfigurations concerning the urban use of vacant buildings. Drawing on a 14-month multi-sited ethnography conducted in Brussels between 2023 and 2025, I examine how these existential tests unfold within disputes over urban occupations, capturing how actors engage in critique and how these critiques contribute to transforming normative urban orders. For this presentation, I will focus on a specific empirical case, the occupation of a former squat in Brussels led by a group of activists in 2024. Initially the mayor was compelled to adjust the official justification for eviction, eventually offering the group access to an alternative vacant building, thereby avoiding forced displacement. I analyse this sequence as an existential test, where contestation not only exposed the fragility of institutional arrangements regarding urban vacancies but also temporarily transformed the normative framework used by city officials to regulate occupations, and so generate a situated utopia in the here and now. This case illustrates how critique, embedded in situated conflicts, can destabilize dominant urban governance logics and open space for alternative forms of urban use and collective negotiation.
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de Briey, O. (2025). From existential tests to concrete utopias: institutional change through occupations conflicts in Brussels. Contested urban policy : breeding concrete utopias, AESOP Planning/Conflict thematic group conference, Berlin.