Hendrik Meert

Rural Community Life and the Importance of Reciprocal Survival Strategies

Although Belgian poverty is mainly concentrated in urban regions, the profound restructuring of labour and food markets, the dismantling of the welfare state and the growth of new types of households are also producing poverty and social exclusion in rural areas. This paper stresses that not every deprived rural household should be regarded as excluded from society. By developing survival strategies, households attempt to escape from social marginalization. To understand these responses, a typology of survival strategies is constructed, based on Polanyi’s spheres of economic integration (market exchange, redistribution and reciprocity). These survival strategies, including agricultural and non-agricultural activities, are analysed in relation to the Hageland,a peripheral rural area in Flanders. Based upon Doreen Massey’s geological metaphor, the current potentials and obstacles embedded in the historical layers of the socio-spatial structure of the area, are assessed. By comparing the results of this research with similar research amongst urban households, some particularities of rural poverty are distinguished.

Segregation and Economic integration of Immigrants in Brussels

During the 1960s and early 1970s, suburbanization was the most important process shaping Brussels’ socio-spatial structure. Fordist accumulation was based on the distribution of productivity gains over profit and wage increases. As such, growing mass production found a market in growing mass consumption. Houses, cars and consumer durables fuelled this growth. These goods required space and became visible because people bought or built houses on the urban fringe, commuted daily by car and accumulated consumer durables at home. Thus, suburbanization in Belgium was the spatial expression of Fordist economic growth. The changing class structure also supported the suburbanization process. Rising levels of education and the development of tertiary activities pushed the Belgian population into upward social mobility. The population of Brussels became increasingly middle class and could draw on its growing incomes to become the owner-occupiers of individual buildings of dwellings outside the city, in a green environment where land prices were affordable.