The Associative Tissue, a Reparative Tissue? Rethinking the Role of the Associative World in Brussels Region in a Context of Securitization and Inequality

In this paper, I reframe the associative tissue as a reparative tissue in the unequal city-region of Brussels, drawing upon fieldwork between 2021 and 2024, while thinking with its potential to go against the grain of securitization and to envision social change and justice from the everyday attachment to place and community. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in 2015 and 2016, the Canal Zone has been framed as “a hotbed of radicalization” shifting its existing territorial stigmatization from a space of relegation to one of confinement, leading to the securitization of socio-economic inequalities (Govers-Lopez & Janssens, forthcoming). While security policies were implemented, the area became the focus of media, scholarly and security attention. Initially, I theorized repair by undoing the silence that existed around the impacts of these security policies by interviewing associations about their experiences. I also participated in a 9-month theatre trajectory with colleague-researchers and a local theatre organization, resulting in an interactive theatre play which created a space of knowledge-production and dialogue. Simultaneously, I participated in activities of associations, while also volunteering in two neighbourhood associations to support youngsters with their homework since respectively 2021 and 2023. From these engagements with associative actors, I started to rethink repair as a praxis of everyday placed-based engagement. Similarly, brown (2017) theorizes social change from small acts by using the metaphor of fractality wherein the small reflects the large, whereas Ortiz and Gomez-Cordoba (2023) shift the lens from territorial stigmatization to territorial healing. This corresponds to Thomas’ (2011) critique of masculinist visions of social change through revolution, development or transformation, proposing instead to think social change from the sphere of the everyday. Bringing insights together from the anthropology of repair, reparative justice theory, and critical urban studies, I therefore explore the associative tissue as a reparative tissue.