The house is an image of the body, of the household, and of the household’s relation to society; it is a physical space designed to mediate between nature and culture, between the landscape and the larger urban built environment. In this sense the dwelling is the basis of both architectural design (as archetypal shelter) and physical planning (as the replicable unit used to form neighborhoods, cities, regions). Because the form of housing carries so many aesthetic, social and economic messages, a serious misfit between a society and its housing stock can create profound unrest and disorientation.

Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work and Family Life (1984)

Figure-head King Albert II and the suburban dream (single-family house + garden + garage) are the glue that binds the factious nation known as Belgium. The country’s utopian ideal is based upon an image of ‘home’ rather than a city or a nation.

Even today, the majority of architectural production furthers the conservative, homogenous social order constructed by one-off, piecemeal ex-urban housing. Architects spend an enormous amount of time reconfiguring the cookie-cutter home, tailored for their clients’ dream, eschewing the banality that has become universal, and thereafter struggle to squeeze through various spatial configurations by strict aesthetic boards. The fact that nearly everyone builds their own house is the result of a historical process which the government has whole-heartedly encouraged. It is a tendency that distinguishes Belgium from other European countries. The liberally-based housing policy of the nation stimulates private initiatives and subsidizes, through cheap loans and tax incentives. In Belgium, approximately 65% of the population owns their own home, one of the highest rates in Europe. There exists no long-standing tradition of collective housing.
The complex and intrinsically contradictory Belgian culture, of highly defined mediocrity, operates within the commodifying values of the late 20th century. The resulting Belgian landscape has become ‘Americanized’ in the worst sense of the term. Housing estates are dormitory warehouses, storing masses of the middle class culture, who commute daily to their workplaces. Unmediated territorial exploitation and neglect has reduced agriculture land and open green space at alarming rates. Ribbon development, of strip malls and big box development, along the extensive road network is further consuming the landscape. Urban centres that have suffered the traumas of post-industrial operations are simultaneously degenerating into a series of intimidating ghettos and being monumentally conserved and packaged for tourism, ‘culture’ and shopping. The residential rings of the first belt around city centres suffers similar processes, leaving them in a continual state of decay and abandonment. Cities are forever depopulating as technological developments continue to reduce the need for geographically driven relationships. Meanwhile, Belgian suburbia continues to mask the juggernaut of the global, technological modern civilization by spatial illusions to life in the countryside. The increased span of space in compressed time threatens the Belgian landscape; illusionary pastorialism of a bygone epoch can no longer be sustained.

Divide and rule

It is not enough to generalize the Belgian domestic landscape as a cohesive entity, adhering to a singular romanticized dream. 1993 constitutional reform redefined Belgium as a federal Kingdom, consisting of 3 communities: the Flemish, French and German-speaking and 3 regions: Wallonia, Flanders and Brussels. The near autonomous regions are all situated at the same level of power as the federal authority. Issues concerning employment, labour, transport and traffic are directed by the Federal Kingdom and the Regions, while housing, public works, urban planning and physical planning are all the mandate of the Regions and Communities. In Belgium there does not exist a national housing policy and the only federal mandate concerning housing relates to legal and fiscal issues such as the right to housing, rental housing law, mortgage loans legislation. Building permits are issued locally within general frameworks and compulsory consultation set at the regional level.
Before 1990, when regionalization in housing became officially operative, there existed two national institutions: the National Housing Society established in 1919 and the National Landowning Society founded in 1935. The former operated in urban areas and its dwellings were primarily rented. The latter worked in rural areas and not only sold dwellings, but also offered cheap loans to private builders. Today, three autonomous regional societies have replaced those of the national level. In Flanders, the Vlaamse Huisvestingsmaatschappij supervises 23 local housing societies in owner sector and 103 in the rental sector. In Wallonia, the Société Régionale Wallonne du Logement supervises 23 local housing societies in owner sector and 107 in the rental sector. The Brussels Gewestelijke Huisvestingsmaatschappij oversees 35 local societies, all of which deal solely in the rental sector.1
The three regions have markedly different housing policies and priorities. The largest region, Flanders (population 5.9 million) has the highest growth rate, lowest proportion of foreign nationals and highest density of inhabitants per km2. From the 1950s to the early 1980s, indiscriminate building, expansion of towns, and the building of local industrial sites and shopping areas in peripheral areas characterized the laissez-faire attitude of physical planning; suburbia blossomed. Increased road infrastructure and consequent ribbon development complemented the urbanization of rural areas and the stagnation of inner-city areas. Following 1960s and 1970s public support of high-rise housing, in the 1980s, housing ceased to be a priority. In the early 1990s, the Flemish region initiated an urgent social housing programme, Domus Flandria, to build 10,000 dwelling units between 1991 and 1995. The new structure plan of Flanders, once approved, will oblige higher densities ? 15 units/hectare in rural areas and 25 units/ hectare in urban areas (these figures are considered high for Belgium, but still pale in comparison to the VINEX location densities in the Netherlands at 40 units/ hectare). Nonetheless, there does not exist a comprehensive survey of existing densities and it is therefore not quite clear what these new references will mean. The Katholiek Universiteit Leuven and Werkplaats voor Architectuur (WVA), commissioned by Administratie Ruimtelijke Ordening, Huisvesting, Monumentenzorg (AROHM), are currently investigating 20 historic and contemporary housing projects and 5 common-place residential fabrics, aspiring to shed light on the relation between density and quality. The structure plan’s call for densification of housing and economic development is predicated upon the paradoxical notion of ‘deconcentrated clustering’.2
The lofty, noble goals are commendable, but one is forced to ponder, as Marcel Smets has: ‘Is our settlement structure still urban? Is its dispersal not so far advanced that the environmental image of Flanders is expressed first and foremost in the twilight zone between city and country? Does the continuing environmental spread not indicate an economic and social preference for decentralized establishments? Has the city not definitely been deserted, in view of the great densification of the road network and the tolerant building permit policy since the second world war? Can we still turn the clock back? Is the government capable of this, even if it is willing to take on this difficult road?’3
The Walloon region (population 3.3 million) continues to suffer from a problematic economic situation. Beginning in the 1970s, post-industrialization hit Wallonia hard. Coal mining, agriculture and the steel industry underwent drastic restructuring as technological innovation and a competitive world market shifted the region’s output. By 1995, unemployment in Wallonia had reached 25% and continues to escalate. The industrialized zones in the river basins of the Meuse, Sambre, Haine and Vesdre accommodate most of the region’s larger towns and have suffered the most dramatic socio-economic transformations; total urbanization of the natural territory has depopulated inner cities and implosion of industrial sites has accentuated decay of vast areas. The most southern zone of the region is of predominantly rural character, but the growth of commercial and service areas is encroaching on the picturesque countryside. The rural zone just south of Brussels has succumbed to the pressures of capital proximity and a carpet of housing developments beginning to bleed together, forming an amorphous artificial territory. The government of Walloon has set its priority of revitalization and renovation of its older industrial centres (particularly Mons, Charleroi and Liège) through concentrated housing and urban renewal projects. However, since the 1980s, public investment has been on the decline and private funding does generally not address the groups most seriously in need of housing.
Brussels (population 950,597) is a city/region of 19 communes and three official languages. One in three inhabitants is a foreigner, with the majority heralding from the Mediterranean and to a lesser extent from the EU civil servants. Brussels is the representation of order in contrast with the unstable nature of a capital city, the juxtaposition of brutality and refinement, the evocation of wealth in the face of poverty. The region of internal divisions and conquests has suffered a negative growth rate over the past two decades and is predicated upon a complex form of inclusion and exclusion, resulting in a series of autonomous, usually mono-functional enclaves. Within the historic Pentagon is a cityscape of poverty, places of squalor plagued by drug use and the drug trade, the areas of division, distrust and destitution, socially and physically isolated from the mainstream. The ‘politics of order’ are decimating the normal residential tissue of the city as unbridled speculation, boosted by incentives to developers, promotes the deliberate destruction of 19th century infrastructure to be superseded by a new global, financial apparatus. In numerous neighbourhoods, the enormous contradictions of voids and abandoned structures alongside dense inhabitation attest to the spiral of destruction. There exists some resistance and local community agitation. Unfortunately, the expression is primarily from the poor, immigrant communities, which do not have a politically recognized voice. A sharp increase in housing costs has been influenced by the influx of EU administrators and speculative demolition/wilful neglect; it is currently estimated that the social housing need in the region is an astonishing 60-70%. In 1997, social housing constituted a mere 8.6% of the total housing in the region. The region spends the majority of its limited funds in the renovation of its old housing stock, of which 56% dates from before 1945.

Cataclysmic change

Until the 1930s, social housing in Belgium was synonymous with architectural and town-planning innovation. However, either colourless banality and authoritarian bombast or overwrought aestheticism, reducing architecture to an impotent formal game, soon allocated housing to the margins of the architectural profession. A discouragingly bureaucratic system kept innovative ideas and young architects out of the collective housing market. When Belgium operated as a national entity, it was a public secret that architectural contracts from the government were granted on the basis of party allegiances and political recommendations. Regionalization has upset the mafia-game to a certain degree and particularly in Flanders, housing competitions have stimulated a re-thinking of the private enclave of traditional housing. The ‘democratic’ process of competitions has yielded innovative housing experiments at the scale of domestic organization, the housing form as well as the urban scale, accounting for the agglomeration of units and the provision of social amenities.
Since 1970, the Belgian population has stagnated from a slow deceleration of natural growth (declining birth rates) and a fall in net migration, due to an economic crisis and a selective immigration process. Nonetheless, the household unit requirements continue to grow due to the greying of the population, higher divorce rates and young people leaving the home at an earlier age.  Smaller families, the increase in unconventional family types, increased mobility and improved communication, allowing people to work at home, has created a ceaseless demand for housing. New typologies need to correspond to a new way of accommodating the population. At the same time, however, a critical questioning of the status quo necessitates the understanding of Belgian’s housing patrimony and to what extent reinterpretation and innovation can be accepted and marketed. For example, privacy is a value safeguarded in Belgium; the typology and agglomeration of units must respond to this reality. Arrangements for access, views, open space and privacy need to be strategically designed in order to respect the culture’s obsession with privacy.
The final change affecting the notion of collective housing is a phenomenon that is occurring everywhere in the world ? investment by the public sector is declining. The essential question for housing in Belgium is to what extent can the private sector be expected to be held accountable for social housing. Can incentives and political commitment form meaningful and profitable public-private partnerships?

‘A new life demands new forms’4

A small, but increasing, number of projects have recently been developed in Belgium which attempt to address a new mode of urban living. There are projects that establish systems of networks as extensions of the metropolitan ‘imploded infrastructure’ situations, while others create sets of personal, closed?off environments of individual oasis within the distorted mental maps of contemporary cities.
The first project in Belgium to radically confront contemporary urban conditions with evolving housing typologies, was by an outsider. Toyo Ito’s residential strips in Antwerp (for the City and the River project ? Stad aan de Stroom in 1993) by their measurement and configuration, couple a suburban lifestyle with an urban density. The superposition of simple structuring principles creates a diverse and dynamic series of urban living typologies. Unfortunately, the project was the victim of politics and will not be realized.
Nonetheless, Belgian architects are following in the footsteps of Ito. The re-use and re-structuring of a substantial fragment of the urban morphology, particularly on imploded city sites has resulted in innovative housing agglomerations. Post-industrial infrastructure has been transformed into large plots of residential fabric, creating urbanism as housing.  Resulting from a limited competition in Gent, Neutelings/Riedijk’s Hollainhof complex employed repetition and variation of a single module unit to create a compact entity focused on itself, taking clues from Belgium’s traditional Beguinage. The site of another competition won by Henk De Smet and Paul Vermeulen in Kortrijk typifies the state of the 19th century expansion residential belt, with its proximity to city centre, multi-functional site and fragmented, small parcellation. The unsentimental, yet contextually sensitive project has withstood numerous institutional and political obstacles. Although it promises to remain a construction site for some time, the large collective space of the reconfigured urban fragment vastly improves the quality of life not only for the inhabitants of the new units, but also for the site’s existing inhabitants.
A series of architecture competitions organized by the Flemish Ministry of the Environment and Housing has prompted the re-evaluation of the traditional morphology of exclusively street-front building within the context of urban infill sites. Development of new typologies and hybrid solutions have contributed more than a simple filling of missing teeth. The redensification within the urban fabric has led to a number of high quality projects. In Roeselare, the group WIT wove rehabilitation, new construction and public space into a compact structure, with particularly well thought out, varied housing typologies and innovative sections. Peter Haverhals and Frank Heylen, in Maaseik, created an intensive use of land and high topological diversity. In a recent competition entry for a private housing development for Bruges, Haverhals and Heylen have pushed the notion of a dense piece of city within the city to an extreme. The house-and-garden ideal has been configured into a labyrinthine morphology; a diverse carpet of privacy, publicity, volumes and open spaces.
Elsewhere in Flanders, smaller collective housing realizations have boldly challenged traditional housing imagery such as Koen Van Synghel’s service apartments for the elderly in Kruishoutem and the built portion resulting from the ‘Living in Ghent’ competition by Bruno Dercon, Pieter T’Jonck and Leo Van Broeck.5
In Brussels, renovation of the existing structures predominates the housing sector. Pierre Blondel’s ‘Mogador’ complex is one of the more innovative conversions; shared spaces revolve around light wells and high spaces and the block’s façade is animated by south facing terraces.  Architects Paul Robbrecht, Hilde Daem and Marie-José van Hee, usually working within the middle to upper class housing sector, are creating neo-modernist structures in a city overwhelmed with the preponderance of post-modernistic façades.
The architects working in Wallonia struggle with extremely strict regulations which demand respect to the vernacular of the region. Nonetheless, architects such as Joëlle Houde and Jean-Paul Verleyen, in their housing project of renovation and new construction in Bouvignes, have managed to successfully incorporate contemporary interventions in dialogue with the historical character of the place.

To each man his castle

Perhaps the contemporary Belgian contribution to innovative housing rests in the hybridization of the Belgian bourgeois dream and the urban, public realm. The criticizing of the status quo, of haphazard suburban development, cannot be accomplished without a clear recognition of the cultural values of the Belgian societal structure. Each household demands its own front door and private open space. New typologies must maintain a grounded relationship with their own tradition. Critical transformation of the programme can simultaneously respond to the techno-economic demands of the market and create new relationships of the public/private, inside/outside, city/landscape, involvement/anonymity, familiarity/strangeness, etc. An intellectual call to arms by architects must be waged in the culture of Belgian housing.
In addition, architects and urbanists must ceaselessly struggle with the looming questions (succinctly posed by Smets) brought to light due to the fact that in the contemporary world, settlement is based upon something other than ‘genius loci’. The proliferation of nameless, placeless enclaves threatens the Belgian landscape. Necessary measures to balance commodification of the environment are utopic. However, modest achievements towards an unobtainable ideal can be made not only by a socio-political ‘will’ but also by the determined commitment of the architectural profession to the intertwining of architecture, urbanism and ethics.
There appears to be a new generation of architects in Belgium who are convincingly able to combine the idealized private house with increased density in the urban centres. The redesigning of the Belgian dream is underway.

1. Statistics for this article were taken from Vlaamse Huisvestingsmaatschappij, la Société Régionale Wallone du Logement and Brusselse Gewestelijke Huisvestingsmaatschappij. Figures are for the year 1997.

2. See also André Loeckx, ‘The difficult art of duality. The Structural Plan for Flanders’, Archis no. 10, 1995, pp. 48-53.

3. Marcel Smets, ‘Urban planning in expectation of…’, in Flanders Architectural Yearbook 1994-1995, p. 261.

4.From the 1926 Soviet competition prospectus for communal dwelling.

5. See Geert Bekaert, ‘Quiet luxury. Flats for the elderly by Koen Van Synghel’, Archis no. 8, 1995, pp. 68-69 and André Loeckx, ‘Dwelling in Ghent. Projects for inner city social housing’, Archis no. 6, 1996, pp. 76-80.