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 number of empty homes in Spain runs to hundreds of thousands, due to abandonment, ruin or simply speculation. These dwellings should be addressed as an urgent general problem by the public administration. If to this we add the thousands of obsolete buildings of facilities now standing unused that could provide the basis for great architecture remodelling projects, the result is a large number of habitable square metres that would alleviate the problem of access to housing and its maintenance.
Recetas Urbanas (RU), a team of architects with a great deal of experience in collective self-building, provide common solutions to this problem by means of active citizen participation.
After tracing lines of protest and proposal, based on rethinking the legal framework—for which RU uses mechanisms of dissemination and seeks partners—a review of the successes and failures of the last 15 years brings us to the present day of “the crisis”: an institutional and political crisis, prompting new attempts to entrust housing strategies to joint public-private responsibility.
The forms of intervention that RU promotes to this end range from collaboration in the construction and management of projects, the completion of buildings, rehabilitation work and rentals in exchange for community work, to housing cooperatives made up of neighbourhood or other collectives that undertake to manage a building of rental apartments, whether publically or privately owned.
