Resumen de Innovation in construction and renovation
Europe is facing a housing affordability crisis, which is aggravating the urban paradox of social inequalities within the most flourishing European agglomerations. The urban housing crunch is continent-wide, but the Eastern European countries are even more challenged as they tend to have more limited means with which to respond to the emerging housing needs.Social and affordable housing providers, including non-profit organisations, respond to this situation by turning towards technical or social innovation to build or renovate so as to make affordable homes available as fast as possible, at a reasonable cost. The solutions presented in this publication have been selected from over 100 projects coming from 20 countries and 2 continents, including 18 applications of innovative construction and renovation. The projects presented in this chapter are working to bring about change, anchoring their approach into challenging outside the box thinking. Some projects play an intermediary role investing in and renovating worn-out properties and proposing innovative and replicable models based on cooperation. Others propose modular housing as an innovative and inexpensive solution to chronic homelessness, making use of vacant land and providing numerous services to users, offering approaches easily transferrable but sometimes questionable in a European context. These solutions are debated and will be regarded by some as risking reinforcing the polarisation of society and condemning people to remain in low quality self-renovated or self-built homes or in ghettos. Some of the projects presented in this chapter have triggered heated discussion in our steering group!The projects proposed in this book are not flawless solutions, and I believe some of them will trigger controversy amongst housing and homelessness experts. However, all have in common the objective to provide pathways out of exclusion and homelessness through an integrated approach looking not only at housing but also at further social integration and community mobilisation. Housing is a start and should be the start. So, for a start, what are the ways to make housing available to all, now?
