Workshops

Seminar organized by RE-DWELL during the International Social Housing Festival, in Barcelona, on 7 June 2023.   Social housing providers are strategic partners in the EU’s strategy to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. Improving energy efficiency is a complex task requiring financial resources, technical expertise and residents’ consensus. This seminar organized by the RE-DWELL MSCA-ITN network brought together practitioners from a variety of fields to discuss the challenges and opportunities related to balancing affordability with sustainability requirements in social housing.   Panelists: -Julien Dijol, Housing Europe, Belgium -Paul Dufraisse, GreenFlex, France -Alex Fernández, TU Delft, Netherlands -Becky Ritchie, Clarion Housing Group, UK -Nina Turull, Sostre Civic, Spain   Moderated by Adriana Diaconu, Université Grenoble-Alpes, France

The workshop took place in the lobby of Helsinki City Hall on 14 June 2022. Around 30 people participated in the workshop, together with 7 ESRs and 7 supervisors and secondment representatives.  The aim of the workshop was to apply a holistic approach to the provision of affordable and sustainable housing, through a use case: A municipality has a piece of land in a working class neighbourhood that is to be developed through a sustainable master plan including affordable housing.  During the three-hour session, participants, organised in four teams, developed a step-by-step strategy that takes into account the interrelationships between the three themes that make up the RE-DWELL research framework: design, planning and construction; community participation, and policy and financing. For each theme, participants were given a brief explanation of the most relevant issues, methods and tools, summarised in a 'wheel'. Each team then had 30 minutes to discuss how those could be applied to the use case, and present the results to the rest of the participants.  This methodology enabled us to put into practice for the first time the transdisciplinary approach that we aim to develop in RE-DWELL.     This is the video recording of the introductory session.