First, Arup’s Alice Charles makes the case for converting Europe’s vacant buildings into homes, in a conversation recorded at our Forum in Venice.

Alice Charles, Director for Cities, Planning and Design at Arup and a Holcim Foundation Board member, argues that Europe’s best route to providing homes is working with a city’s existing building stock. She says that vacant and derelict buildings can be converted in a fraction of the time it takes to plan and finance new ones.

Her vast experience includes running the World Economic Forum’s cities and urban development work, bringing mayors, developers, insurers and pension funds to the same table.

Drawing on lessons from urban projects of all shapes and sizes, she shared her insights with us at the Holcim Foundation Forum in Venice last year.

For the next generation of city makers, where does the opportunity lie?

We have a housing crisis, and the opportunity is to stop politicizing housing, stop the financialization of housing, and remember that we all want somewhere to live. We need to gather the data, diagnose the problem, and collectively form solutions: communities, policymakers, planners, architects, engineers, financiers, and developers. Constructive dialogue, or radical collaboration, if you want to call it that, drives change in our built environment.

At what scale can you actually get things done in a city?

I’ve worked at every scale, from the building to the city, and each matters. At the city scale, it is about setting the long-term vision. But the vision means nothing if it doesn’t break down into transformative projects. All too often, we create a vision and don’t think about the governance structures we need, capacity building, private-sector partnerships, financing, or what it takes to make those projects bankable.

People talk about building new homes, but that takes a lot of time. You have to zone land, create master plans, get planning permission, get finance. In essence, you’re talking about 10 years away, and we have a crisis right now. Vacant buildings are ready to be converted, and we can do it much faster. Over the next number of years in Europe, I’d like to see us get serious about our vacant and derelict buildings.

The Holcim Foundation’s support for HouseEurope!, a non-profit that campaigns to reuse Europe’s existing buildings to improve urban sustainability, continued this year with the Open Table, a follow-up to the Foundation’s 2025 Brussels fellowship.

Earlier this year, six Holcim Foundation Fellows spent a day with a series of experts at the Deutsches Architektur Zentrum in Berlin. The Fellows created nine short stories, each challenging the myth that one sustainability goal must come at the expense of another, such as building green at the expense of profit.

For the Fellows, the value lay in who was in the discussion: experts from policy, property development, culture, and academia, including a former Romanian Secretary of State for Culture. “As a young professional, you’re in a room with people who have ultimately shaped the industry to be how it is now,” says Natalie Feakins (pictured), a structural engineer in Basel and one of the six Fellows at the table.

The result of the session is a report, The Open Table: Designing Incentives for Change, published on October 27, 2026, which HouseEurope! will build on with an event in spring 2027.

On the evening of October 6, the Holcim Foundation held its second CityMakers Live event in Madrid. The timing was apt; Spain had just recorded its hottest summer since measurements began in 1961.

At the same time, the city council is replacing its General Urban Plan, the document that has governed Madrid’s growth since 1997. With this in mind, five experts shaping the Spanish capital’s future joined a lively discussion, moderated by Júlia López Ventura, Regional Director for Europe at C40 Cities, at Infinito Delicias, a 1960s metalworks reborn as a center for culture, food, and community.

A key take-home came from Myriam Peón González, General Director of the Urban Planning Office, who said Madrid is growing fast and becoming more attractive to new residents and talent, and that is precisely the danger.

“We could die of success: a fantastic city that is a horror to live in,” she noted.

The panel agreed that the biggest changes needed to cool down Madrid lie in the buildings the city already has. “Rehabilitation must become a culture, because we have to fix the city we have,” Peón González added. “We can’t keep expanding.”