How to best respond to the unfolding housing crisis in Europe and beyond? Together with researchers and students from the University of Zambia, housing practitioners, municipal officials, and housing scholars from four European countries met at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning of the University of Stuttgart to exchange ideas about how to keep the social in housing and rents affordable. The event was organized by the team of the Department of International Urbanism at the Institute of Urban Planning and Design.
Growing and changing housing demands in urban areas, exacerbated by rising construction costs, have increased square metre rental prices manifold over the last decade. In this context, municipalities and non-profit housing providers have struggled to provide enough affordable homes to the ones left behind by the market. The group of housing experts from Denmark, Germany, Portugal, Serbia, and Zambia discussed architectural, planning, and policy responses to the housing affordability crisis.
One key response explored was sufficiency or the reduction of living space per person. This raises questions, however: how can societies reduce living space per person in a just way? Under which conditions will the housing market provide smaller apartments, and who else can provide the needed homes? How can tenants stay in their homes when their families grow or shrink? Recent social or affordable housing projects point to solutions such as cluster homes or building co-operatives.
The municipality of Tübingen, for instance, develops studio apartments for key workers that share a generous common space – so-called cluster homes. Projects developed as part of IBA’27 in Stuttgart follow similar concepts and maximise flexible shared areas for socialising and co-working.
Andreas Hofer, artistic director of IBA’27, furthermore questioned the perception that cities cannot develop any more: “It’s a myth that cities have no space!”. The dynamism of urban change processes would repeatedly open up spaces for developments, including for affordable housing developments. Symposium participants visited and discussed various projects, and exchanged perspectives on these topics in panel discussions and workshops.
