#5 The housing question

We call on the City of Esch to establish a permanent, funded infrastructure of co-authorship in housing futures — a procedure through which residents' everyday dwelling practices and their needs for community and common good carry the same procedural weight in planning as masterplans, forecasts, and investment dossiers.

This premise is analytical, not metaphorical. Beckert's Imagined Futures (2016) shows that action under uncertainty is structured by fictional expectations that bindingly organize the present; Aalbers (2016) shows housing is increasingly treated as an asset class whose value depends on the credibility of such future images. Masterplans are thus production apparatuses, not representations: they authorize certain hopes as realistic while demoting other, already-lived realities — the vacancy on Rue de l'Alzette, for instance — to the merely provisional. Genz and Helbrecht's work on ontological security (2023) and Löw's sociology of space (2016) supply the vocabulary to describe this not as sentiment but as a measurable rupture in the everyday practices through which people experience themselves as situated, connected, and part of a community.

This premise meets, in Esch, a concrete institutional constellation. Pacte Logement 2.0 (2021–2032) obliges municipalities to develop a Programme d'action local logement (PAL) with a Conseiller logement. Article 29bis of the law of 19 July 2004 requires every PAP "nouveau quartier" to cede an increased share of affordable housing to the public sector. Both instruments remain purely quantitative-distributive: they regulate how much affordable housing is produced, not whose knowledge of daily life and community wellbeing counts as legitimate in defining "quality" and "need." Our demand extends these existing procedures rather than creating parallel structures:

First, a mandatory assessment of everyday life and community needs as a binding component of every PAL and PAP-NQ approval — close, on-the-ground research into daily routines, neighbourly relations, informal care, and shared use of space, carrying equal standing to the feasibility studies already required under Article 29bis. The governing question is not approval but continuity: can residents still recognize their own everyday practices and sense of community in the future staged for them, and where does that recognition break down?

Second, a standing Dwelling Practice Council with veto power within the PAL process, not merely an advisory role — extending the Conseiller logement, who currently advises primarily on feasibility and funding, through a body of residents, researchers close to everyday urban life, and representatives of precariously housed communities, empowered to force a revision loop before final adoption, not after.

Crucially, this cannot be addressed as background noise. Esch's housing market is shaped not by abstract population pressure but by the specific refiguration of a post-industrial transition — the long departure from steel, which produces growth-islands and shrinking peripheries simultaneously (CRC 1265, TU Berlin). The vacancies e.g. on Rue de l'Alzette are not market failure but uneven refiguration: planning apparatuses anticipate a future that, elsewhere in the same city, is already experienced as outdated or unreachable. This coexistence of intensive planning and lived ambivalence is the structural signature of post-industrial transformation itself — comparable to the Lausitz after the coal phase-out, though differently timed and governed. Refiguration must therefore itself become an object of assessment: the study of everyday life and community needs (Instrument 1) must document not only isolated daily routines but their embeddedness in the city's uneven refiguration — which neighbourhoods are treated as "growth islands," which as periphery, and how that status shifts across the steel industry's afterlife, and what it means for the common good in each case.

Third, anticipatory justice as an auditable criterion in municipal housing strategy. Heffron and McCauley's Just Transition framework (2018) asks who bears the costs and hopes of industrial transformation; we extend it temporally: who is asked to wait, and for how long, on a future they did not co-author? Only once refiguration is documented as an object of assessment can this be meaningfully operationalized — whoever waits does not wait in the abstract, but within a specific regional choreography of upgrading and devaluation that must itself become an object of democratic negotiation. This criterion must stand explicitly alongside cost and feasibility in every PAL revision.

These instruments are not participation theatre layered onto existing procedures, but a substantive extension of what Pacte Logement 2.0 and Article 29bis currently fail to capture: that the housing question is decided not only in square metres and subsidies, but in whose everyday dwelling, community, and sense of the common good is allowed to count as expertise. This is the transdisciplinary translation approach for which THE ESCH CLINICS/COA, as an infrastructure for urban commoning and democracy-building, is positioned: not to resolve these registers prematurely into one technical fix, but to hold them simultaneously operative within a binding municipal procedure for Esch's housing future.

Aalbers, M. B. (2016). The financialization of housing. Routledge.
Beckert, J. (2016). Imagined futures: Fictional expectations and capitalist dynamics. Harvard University Press.
Genz, C., & Helbrecht, I. (2023). Negotiations of urban ontological security: The impact of housing insecurity on being-in-the-city. Housing, Theory and Society, 40(1), 22–41.
Heffron, R. J., & McCauley, D. (2018). What is the "just transition"? Geoforum, 88, 74–77.
Löw, M. (2016). The sociology of space: Materiality, social structures, and action. Palgrave Macmillan.
Ministère du Logement et de l'Aménagement du territoire. (2021). Pacte Logement 2.0: Vademecum. Gouvernement du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg. https://www.pactelogement.lu
Loi modifiée du 19 juillet 2004 concernant l'aménagement communal et le développement urbain, art. 29bis. (2004). Mémorial A, Journal officiel du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg.