Ideas, strategies and projects that give rise to pilot projects. They tackle the challenges raised by the stakeholders involved and which are found in particular places in Barcelona or Medellín.
The project makes a firm commitment to urban regeneration, focusing on homeless people. By arranging fragments of the house inside the city, it seeks to provide the basic services of a home for people without one.
How is housing produced in Medellín? What is the architect’s role? We have embarked on a search for a local phenomenon, the Plot by Plot: a way of creating housing that shows up the irregularities in the housing market.
The Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, the PAH, was set up in 2009 as a community response to the situation of many families who, unable to pay their mortgages, exposed themselves to becoming homeless and burdening themselves with unmanageable debts. Six years later, the PAH is the key social movement for defending and securing basic rights to housing.
The ‘La Borda’ housing cooperative for granting property use grew from the neighbours’ movement associated with Can Batlló. The aim was to provide access to a non-speculative, affordable model of housing in the city.
Barcelona City Council has transferred the lease of a building in the Born district that has been earmarked for renovation to the housing cooperative SostreCívic. It will provide homes for five families through an innovative, part access, part ownership, access scheme: right of use. It will also include new relationship frameworks between neighbours and a participatory, eco-friendly design.
Informal, unplanned growth brings about a deterioration in living conditions in the environs of Medellín. The Integrated Improvement of the Habitat (MIH) is defined as a series of interventions for the physical, social, economic, organisational and environmental improvement of makeshift settlements by working cooperatively and at local level.
The gender-free house is a house that takes into account the diversity of female users, activities, feelings and requirements. A space to live in that caters to the dualities of life: intimacy-gathering; fixed-mobile; inside-outside; personal-collective, silence-noise; visible-invisible; light-darkness; large-small; work-leisure; together-apart; love-hate; birth-death; everything…nothing…
Mobilising empty flats so they can be allocated to social housing is one of the aims that have been established for increasing the public stock of rented housing and meeting the growing demand for flats with affordable rents. Buying, revamping and encouraging the sale of flats by owners are part of the strategies that Barcelona City Council has been implementing.
A project by M.U.L.A. (Urban Share-Farming The Alternative Home) or how a group of young people exemplify a way of living that is beneficial to people with scant resources and disused housing. Urban share-farming and its potential.