Vrije Universiteit Brussel | Brussels | Belgium
The Brussels Centre for Urban Studies brings together researchers from the social sciences, humanities and engineering and aims to support inter- and transdisciplinary research projects in urban studies. Bas Van Heur described how the centre operates.
What are the motivations for the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies?
On a general level, the rationale of the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies is pretty similar to urban studies centres across other universities – it’s to offer a university-wide platform to bring together researchers doing research on the urban. To a large extent, it’s about visibility, both internal visibility of people becoming acquainted with each other, and external visibility, in that it makes so much sense to do something with us being in Brussels. Due to the institutional and historical position of our ‘Dutch-speaking’ university within a city in which the lingua franca is predominantly French, this wasn’t really being done, or at least not enough. So there’s distance towards the city. Also, the fact that Brussels is the de facto capital of the European Union just made it so logical to do something that related to urban studies, Brussels, and the wider European context.
How do you support interdisciplinary research in the Centre?
We provide seed funding for small projects. In our first round of funding from 2015 to 2019, we used that money primarily to attract visiting research fellows. The idea was that a visiting research fellow needed to be supported by at least two research groups, and then the research fellow becomes a connecting element between them. And that worked quite well, in some cases. In the current round of funding, from 2019 until 2024, we decided to use the seed money for small projects that are interdisciplinary, comparative, and engaged. We explicitly asked for more engaged projects, that also colour outside the lines when it comes to output, not necessarily classic peer-reviewed journal articles. We’ve had very different kinds of projects, and also from very different kinds of research groups. For example, we’ve had the more applied work of working with schools on climate stories, which was supported from people coming from media studies, we had a project on the impact of finance and housing, which was from geography. We’ve had a project on decolonial Black Europe in Brussels, which was largely from literature and gender studies. We’ve had stuff on urban farming and irrigation, which came from hydrology, and on repair cafes for digital rights, which was from law and STS. The projects really helped to broaden the group of researchers active in the Centre. It works really well. And the output is quite nice, with more visual outputs, and action-based outputs.
How do you work with non-academic partners in the city?
In practice, most engagement and research valorisation is tackled on the project level. So that means we have research projects in which elements of research and policy or civic engagement take place and that we collectively do a lot of. Then there’s a more public engagement level where there’s a translation from an academic to a non-academic world. We run a so-called StadsSalonsUrbains lecture series, which brings in international speakers. We host it in a café in the centre of Brussels and it’s free and open to the public. It’s still relatively academic, it attracts mostly students, but it is open to a wider audience. This lecture series has been organized for quite some years already, but since 2021 – and partially an after-effect of covid – we are also streaming and recording these lectures. More broadly, the Centre is part of an active Brussels ecosystem that pays a lot of attention to applied and engaged research, ranging from individual or project-level collaborations with civil society to a funding agency (Innoviris) that actively supports applied research to interuniversity networks (Brussels Studies Institute, Brussels Academy) that bring together different stakeholders across the city.
