Beyond housing. On the role of commoning in the establishment of a Community Land Trust project

Urban commons scholars increasingly present Community Land Trusts (CLTs)
as a model to manage ‘housing commons’. The collective property framework
and institutional design of CLTs offer an innovative yet strenuous approach to
facilitate collective access to affordable housing and urban land for
underprivileged groups. Although these scholars emphasise the indispensable
role of collective action, i.e. ‘commoning’ in the establishment of urban CLTs
and their projects, relatively little attention is paid to its implications and
consequences for the groups involved. This paper studies the genesis of the first
CLT project on the European mainland through the lens of ‘commoning’. It
sheds light both on the role of collective action in the institutional design of
Community Land Trust Brussels and on the participatory nature of the
development of its first project. This reveals not only the empowering potential
of commoning practices, but also the challenges related to scaling up such
practices