Project R-13371

Collective Intimacy: Engaging in pleasure and desire as a path towards sustainability in the social housing context in Limburg, Belgium. (Research)

The sustainable development approach has been widely adopted by Belgium and most European countries. This approach considers ecological sustainability a pressing global problem, a key element to securing our future, and a measure of development. Past development strategies emphasized investing in education and health while promoting equitable economic growth. The policies supporting these three pillars were designed to strengthen people's individual agency and productivity for their own private interests. Consequently, this framework for development diminished people's capacity to organize as a collective, as active agents of change. Collective Intimacy explores strategies that nurture the capacity for collective action in participatory urban planning processes. Concretely, the research examines the concept and practice of pleasure in design as a means for enabling people to achieve agency as a collective body. This raises the question: Can the experience of pleasure be a path to overcoming the individual and collectively embracing responsibility towards others and the environment? In line with my previous work in Venezuela, I will link this participatory spatial planning research specifically to the desire to eat. As the desire to eat connects our thinking with our body, it also connects us with our surroundings, with food. It is a situation deeply connected to pleasure as all our senses are involved in the action. Eating is a scenario for collectivity as it includes the labor behind it: foraging, harvesting, planting, cooking, cleaning, and building or finding comfort. Eating is a moment of individual satisfaction and is also a space where collectivity can be experienced at its best. Methodologically, the research will take Annemarie Mol's Eating in Theory approach of expanding philosophical terminology and building upon ethnographic stories about eating as a source of inspiration. In the case of this research, eating is conceptualized as a space to exercise embodied being together. The research will analyze different experiences of eating to provide lessons for building collective pleasure, taking cues from human metabolic engagements with the world. The process will be carried and organized around bodily pleasure: cooking together, eating together, and gardening together. As a result, it aims to design and build "collective intimacy scenarios", inserting fluid spaces, a derivative of the lessons around eating, in the social housing context in Limburg, pleasure-centered spaces for democratic participation and radical engagement. Small-scale built structures, where neighbours can strengthen collective capacities, enjoy each other and mend their relationship with their environment. Annemarie Mol's 'Eating in Theory' creates an opening that this research will expand upon by providing eating-dominant examples of collective-intimacy-making and fluid tools on how to spatialize it.

01 August 2022 - 31 July 2026