BIJDRAGEN AAN RUIMTELIJKE RECHTVAARDIGHEID IN DE TRANSIT-STAD. Analyse van stedelijke praktijken van gedwongen migranten en burgersolidariteit in de stedelijke openbare ruimte: lessen uit de Brusselse Noordwijk

This doctoral research investigates forced migration as a contemporary urban condition, by focusing on the spatial practices of migrants caught in a suspended legal state. Denied access to fundamental rights that materialize as precariousness in urban public spaces, the condition quickly becomes a spatial matter. Investigating the ethical role of spatial practitioners and designers to advance justice, it asks: What lessons can we learn from the city-making strategies of displaced persons to legitimize the presence of those with weak legal claims to the city, and how can design be leveraged to enact spatial justice? Through a context-specific, case-based exploration in the North Quarter of Brussels, Belgium, an area that became entangled with migration during the 2015 European refugee 'crisis', the research investigates how migrant welcoming occurred within a hostile legal framework from that moment on. It studies the spatial practices of undocumented migrants in urban public space and the citizen solidarities that enable them - conditions that are ever-changing and in constant flux, grappling with methodical questions of how to capture mobile dynamics and ephemerality. It mobilizes design and action research through a transdisciplinary approach, enmeshed in multiple situated positions, and engages in collaborative processes, and various activities. The methodology includes a vast literature review across disciplines; multiple ethnographic methods (participant observation, architectural and digital ethnography, focus groups and conversations); drawing (time-based and interpretative mapping, diagramming, collaging, and illustrating) and teaching. Uncovering the complicity of traditional design and planning practices in perpetuating exclusion, it uses various forms of representation to inscribe the spatial claims of migrants and the citizen solidarities supporting them, revealing how migrant and citizen practices can inform more inclusive and just approaches. To do this it first unsettles established narratives on integration, citizenship and permanence, advocating instead for shifts in perspectives toward solidarity, agency, passage and inscription. The lessons learned find that to move toward spatial justice, spatial disciplines need to dismantle complicity by leveraging their roles toward underserved groups of people— in this case, forced migrants caught in limbo. In learning from the North Quarter as a Passage City, it approaches leverage from three positions in spatial disciplines - urban design, urban research and planning - calling for an active stance toward change and action, by re-orienting their roles toward empowerment, possibility and action, respectively. These are demonstrated as acts of leverage, acts of resistance, and acts of justice. Based on the premise that spatial designers have an ethical obligation to expose inequalities, dismantle complicity, and leverage their practices, this research places forced migration, as it manifests in its suspended state in urban public space, into the discourse of Architecture, Urban Design, Landscape Urbanism, and Urban Planning as a matter of spatial justice.

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