Why the Shared Courtyard Block Common Across Europe Never Took Root in Belgium
Walk through many of Europe's older city centres, and you'll likely cross into a courtyard. Buildings line the street, but behind them sits a shared green space — quieter, semi-private, stitched together from the backs of a dozen different properties. It's old, it's widespread, and it still gets built today.
None of this is how Belgium builds. Belgium's housing stock leans heavily toward single-family homes, though a significant share of these are terraced or semi-detached rather than standalone detached houses — a pattern entrenched in individual preferences, real estate values and legislation, according to research published in the Journal of Architecture and Urban Design (2025). This article looks at what the courtyard block actually is, and at the specific housing-policy decisions that kept it from taking root in Belgian cities.
Key Takeaways
- A courtyard block is a traditional development pattern: separate buildings, each with its own entrance and owner, line the edges of a city block around one shared interior courtyard.
- The model shares land, walls, infrastructure and gardens among many small owners — without the construction and upkeep costs that come with a single high-rise tower.
- In Belgium, the De Taeye Act of 1948 pushed subsidised mortgages toward privately owned single-family houses — each on its own plot, whether detached, semi-detached or terraced — not block-coordinated collective housing, according to the Journal of Architecture and Urban Design (2025).
- Social housing made up just 5.6% of Belgium's housing stock in 2023, compared with 16% in France and about a third in the Netherlands — a gap that matters because collective housing types like courtyard blocks usually need institutional developers behind them.
What Is a Courtyard Block, and Why Does It Work Elsewhere?
Courtyard urbanism describes a development pattern in which buildings sit along the perimeter of a city block and enclose a shared interior courtyard, rather than forming one large apartment complex. The key difference from a typical apartment tower isn't the outdoor space — it's who owns what. A single courtyard block can contain many smaller buildings, each with its own entrance, its own identity, its own owner, builder and financing, all sharing a coherent public face and a protected green centre.
The physical shape
A typical courtyard block runs four to seven storeys. Floor plans stay shallow, so daylight and ventilation reach more than one side of each home. Units face both the street and the courtyard. Shops, offices or parking usually sit at street level, with housing stacked above.The economics
Because the block shares land, party walls, infrastructure, gardens and amenities across many owners, it avoids the construction and maintenance costs that come with building and running a single high-rise tower. The street stays public and busy. The courtyard stays something else entirely — a quieter, semi-private world.That's also where the social function sits. Families eat outdoors there; tenant associations and resident councils organise around it. The courtyard is more than a landscaped amenity — it's the shared infrastructure that makes distributed ownership workable at all.
Why Doesn't Belgium Build This Way?
A courtyard block only works if a city block is treated as one coordinated project with many small owners inside it. Belgium's post-war housing policy pushed in the opposite direction: toward one owner, one plot, one single-family house.
The De Taeye Act of 1948 offered subsidies to private builders and put in place a mortgage system that, according to research published in the Journal of Architecture and Urban Design (2025), allowed homeowners to borrow up to 90% of a property's construction cost. In the first five years after the act, Belgium built around 20,000 houses a year — roughly 75% of all new homes — mostly modest single-family houses in semi-rural areas, the same research found.
That building boom had nowhere to be coordinated. Belgium's regional spatial planning framework, introduced through the 1962 Urban and Regional Planning Act, took until the late 1970s to be fully rolled out across the country, a gap the Journal of Architecture and Urban Design (2025) links directly to dispersed private dwellings and suburbanisation. A courtyard block needs someone — a municipality, a developer, a planning framework — to treat a city block as a single unit before construction starts. Without that coordinating layer fully in place, and with mortgage subsidies flowing toward individually owned houses on individual plots instead, there was little reason for landowners to combine parcels around a shared courtyard. The outcome is the housing stock Belgium has today: predominantly single-family, though more often terraced or semi-detached than fully detached — a pattern that has hardened over decades into the real estate values and legislation built around it.
Belgium's Social Housing Gap, Compared With Its Neighbours
Courtyard blocks elsewhere are rarely built by one private owner alone. They tend to need a non-profit housing association, a municipal developer, or a cooperative structure able to coordinate several buildings around a shared plan. Belgium is thin on that kind of actor.
Social housing made up only 5.6% of Belgium's housing stock in 2023, compared with 16% in France and about a third in the Netherlands, according to the Journal of Architecture and Urban Design (2025). That gap matters less as a statement about affordability and more as a statement about capacity to organise and finance collective housing projects at scale.
Where Belgium Is Actually Experimenting With Collective Living — and Why It's Not in Cities
Belgium isn't ignoring collective housing altogether. It's just looking for it somewhere other than the city block. Recent Belgian architectural policy attention has shifted from urban-centre densification toward densification that respects village architecture qualities, the Journal of Architecture and Urban Design (2025) reports.
One concrete example sits in the village of Uikhoven. A Hasselt University research-by-design studio — 49 students and 4 teachers, running during the first semester of the 2024–2025 academic year — produced 18 multigenerational housing typologies for the village, according to the same published research.
The brief behind that studio work aimed to stimulate informal care as a normal part of community living, and to counter the social segregation of older residents who are often housed apart from younger generations. That's a different social ambition from the tenant councils and shared courtyards of the urban model described earlier — but it's built on the same underlying premise: that housing works better when it's organised around a shared space rather than around isolated, single-owner plots. Belgium's current appetite for that idea is visible in a village studio project, not yet in an urban block.
What It Would Take to Bring Courtyard Urbanism to a Belgian City
Courtyard-block development depends on a specific set of conditions being in place before construction starts — conditions quite different from the ones Belgium's own housing policy has produced. Pulling together what this article has already covered — the De Taeye Act's mortgage incentives, the slow rollout of regional planning, and Belgium's comparatively small social-housing sector — suggests a rough checklist of what would need to change before a Belgian city could realistically build this way:
- A way to coordinate several small parcels within one city block under a shared design, rather than developing each plot in isolation.
- Financing products aimed at small and mid-sized developers, not just single-family mortgages or large-scale apartment schemes.
- A larger base of non-profit or public housing actors able to take on multi-building block projects — a gap reflected in Belgium's comparatively small social-housing sector.
- A regional planning mandate strong enough to treat a city block as a planning unit, filling the coordination gaps that persisted during the slow rollout of regional planning through the late 1970s.
- Building and fire-safety practice adapted to perimeter-block buildings with shared courtyards, rather than treating each building as a standalone structure.
FAQ
Is a courtyard block the same as cohousing? No. Cohousing usually describes an intentional community that chooses to live together and often shares governance from the start. A courtyard block shares an outdoor space and infrastructure, but the buildings around it can have entirely independent owners, builders and finances who never formally join a single community project.
Could an existing Belgian city block be retrofitted around a shared courtyard? In principle, yes — some existing blocks already have unused interior space behind the buildings. In practice, the same financing and parcel-subdivision issues would apply, and while some interior-block or shared-courtyard renovation projects exist in Belgium — notably in Brussels — none fully replicate the classic peripheral courtyard-block model.
Does courtyard housing cost less to build than an apartment tower? It tends to, structurally, because many owners share land, walls, infrastructure and amenities instead of each funding a full standalone building. That's a tendency built into the model, not a guaranteed saving on any given project — costs still depend on land prices, construction methods and local site conditions.
Conclusion: A Courtyard Model Still Waiting for Its City Block
Belgium is testing collective housing right now — just not in the places courtyard blocks have historically worked. The Hasselt studio in Uikhoven shows real appetite for shared, multigenerational living arrangements. Belgian city blocks, meanwhile, remain largely organised around the one-owner-one-plot legacy the De Taeye Act set in motion almost eight decades ago.
Whether that village-based experimentation eventually finds its way into a city block is an open question. Nothing in Belgium's current planning attention suggests it's imminent — but nothing rules it out either.
