Tracing Resistance: deep-mapping contestation in a postwar social housing estate

Postwar high‑rise social housing estates in Europe - once the epitome of welfarist‑modernist utopian experiments in communal living - have often become sites of contestation, where marginalised groups mobilise varied forms of resistance to challenge robust institutional frameworks, often underpinned by prescriptive living norms. Not coincidentally, such estates have repeatedly formed the backdrop to protests and riots. Since the early twenty‑first century, estate‑renovation programs have reignited debates about meaningful participation and institutional learning in contexts marked by informality and inequality such as housing estates. Meanwhile, in Brussels, regional reforms standardized and rationalized social‑housing governance, while institutionalizing tenant participation and social mediation. Residents report a perceived loss of individual and collective agency, tied to the erosion of informal, locally grounded political tools (Sennett, 1970, cit. Robert Lane) and to rising tenancy insecurity that dampen the ability to speak up. This contribution explores how inhabitants, housing managers, social workers and other local actors navigate these governance shifts and resist the induced narrowing of voice. Focusing on cooperative postwar estate Germinal, in the outskirts of Brussels, it traces “dispersed forms of resistance” (Lilja & Vinthagen, 2018) and asks: (1) how actors restore political tools and reclaim influence, and (2) how space is mobilized as arenas of contestation, where in-situ, everyday appropriations make and remake power relations. The central device is a large‑format map of Germinal that traces these dispersed resistances and shows how communal spaces and institutions are confronted, appropriated, adopted or subverted. It employs deep mapping (e.g. Bodenhamer et al., 2015), integrating spatial and social layers and is informed by ethnographic fieldwork (including a three‑month period of “living in”, observations, and interviews) and discourse analysis (pamphlets, posters, social media, tags and graffiti…). As such, the research seeks a more integrative and multifaceted understanding of renovation and governance, informing on how more subtle, dispersed forms of resistance and civic pressure can inform institutional learning.