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.
Barcelona City Council aims to make officially protected housing more accessible to the public through building leases. These represent a new formula lying halfway between purchasing and renting and they enable lessees to become flat owners by paying very affordable monthly fees similar in price to social-housing rent.
Squatting is the practice of occupying, using and enjoying abandoned spaces and is employed by urban popular classes to provide immediate solutions to their housing needs or lack of a place for gatherings, work or leisure. There is a long tradition of squatting in Barcelona and it has taken various forms depending on the social and urban conditions and circumstances of the day.
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.
