The city of Barcelona welcomes the annual conference of the European Network for Housing Research (ENHR) on its first day, where the challenges and realities currently experienced in European cities regarding the need and the right to housing are highlighted. This event, which will last until Friday, September 2, is made up of different workshops and plenary sessions, where housing sector professionals, both public and private, will share their visions and projects to find solutions to the current problems of this area.
Núria Moliner, housing researcher and communicator, has hosted the institutional act in its 34th edition. “The ENHR began in 1988 and this year it is celebrated in our city. Barcelona shows a perfect picture of the housing situation, which also occurs in many European cities”, the speaker pointed out. To complete the institutional welcome, they have had academic achievements from the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB) such as: Jordi Ros, vice-rector and professor at the UPC, Montserrat Pareja-Eastaway, professor at the UPC and vice-president of the ENHR, and Josep Maria Montaner, professor and professor at the UPC.
Barcelona: an emerging model
Peter Boelhouwer, president of the ENHR, has underscored in his opening speech the objectives of the conference regarding the exchange of knowledge and new ideas to face the new realities that the housing sector is experiencing. As well as the importance of holding this year’s conference in the city of Barcelona. “The exchange of new ideas, the connection between research and policies, new working networks… can take place in new housing policies that are adapted to needs and propose solutions for the future”, Boelhouwer has stated.
The Housing Manager of Barcelona City Council, Javier Buron, has defined the Barcelona scene at this conference as “an unconsolidated model, but an emerging model for emerging models”. Regarding the ENHR in Barcelona, Buron has assured that it is a city familiarized to receiving delegations from other cities which are interested in housing measures and projects such as: the High Complexity Buildings program, co-housing, the Intervention Service in situations of Loss of Housing and Occupations (SIPHO), etc. “The hosting cities these ENHR conferences promote the growth of the number of researchers, and this causes more professionals trying to find solutions to the same problem, which can later contribute to the design of new public policies”, he has added.
Housing as a basic right and an investment
In the debate entitled ‘Housing under the rule of finance in global cities’, the conversation has begun contrasting the right to housing as a basic human right with housing as an investment and speculation. In order to go deeper, during the first plenary session, moderated by Iván Tosics (general director of the Budapest Metropolitan Research Institute), the following have intervened: Raquel Rolnik and Josh Ryan-Collins.
Raquel Rolnik, professor of Urbanism at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo, has been very critical of investment and pension funds that use housing as investment. “These funds and investment groups do not care if a home is empty or not, because they seek long-term benefit where the value will multiply. Turning the home into an investment”, she has warned. Rolnik has a global perspective on housing, thanks to her experience between 2008 and 2014 as ‘Special Rapporteur for the Right to Housing’, appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council. “It is very difficult to regulate housing considering there is no single legal framework which controls the real estate market and protects the right to housing at the same time,” the expert has concluded.
The associate professor of Economics and Finance at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London (UCL), Josh Ryan-Collins, has liked the policies that carried out by the Barcelona City Council to promote affordable, public and social housing. Ryan-Collins, who is also a member of the council of the Progressive Economy Forum in the United Kingdom, has stated: “Barcelona, with the measures applied by the city council, is shaping the municipal housing market, refocusing the direction of the real estate market”.
Reform and recovery to Europe
The global pandemic of COVID-19 and the Ukraine war have left the European continent in a serious situation, as they has exposed in the second plenary session ‘Building Back Better: Reform and Recovery in Europe’. During this colloquium, European housing policies has been presented as a method of transforming the crisis into a new housing opportunity.
Alice Pittini, research director of the ‘Housing Europe’ federation, has stated that public investment must be promoted from Europe to ensure an inclusive energy transition for all neighborhoods. In the other hand, Julie Lawson, associate professor at the Center for Urban Research at RMIT University (Australia), and Pavlo Fedoriv, Lead Researcher in New Housing Policies in Ukraine, have presented the weak points of the current reconstruction plans and a comprehensive revision of the rental market to reflect wartime conditions.
Networking and new projects
The first day of the ENHR has ended at the ETSAB canteen where five innovative projects related to the housing sector in Barcelona have been presented, such as: La Dinamo, a foundation whose main objective is to promote and consolidate the cooperative housing model in use of land; RE-DWELL, a research platform with the aim of training a new generation of professionals with the necessary transdisciplinary knowledge to bring affordable and sustainable housing to Europe; Housing and health – ASPB, based on the Barcelona Public Health Agency (ASPB) where it is shown how housing conditions can have repercussions on people’s physical and mental health; Radical Housing Journal, a magazine that seeks to intervene and critically reflect as well as disseminate housing activism strategies around the world; and, the Barcelona Housing Studies Cathedra, an interuniversity chair of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) together to promote teaching and research in the field of public policy housing and renovation.