Solving Europe’s housing challenge starts with trust
Reflections from the European Urban Regeneration and Housing Summit
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Laura Viscovich
Executive Director, Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction
Zürich, Switzerland
Last updated: October 22, 2026 Zug, Switzerland
It was incredibly inspiring to visit Copenhagen, ranked the world’s most liveable city for the second year running by The Economist Intelligence Unit. In particular, I got to see with my own eyes in the Nordhavn neighbourhood what long-term ambition, cross-sector partnership and people-first innovation can do for urban planning and quality housing provision. Our September CityMakers newsletter documents The Copenhagen Way and includes interviews with two of the Foundation’s Board members, Thure Krarup and Signe Kongebro. Between them they highlight the importance of trust and co-responsibility amongst public and private stakeholders to define new ways of working together.
My key takeaway was that more cross-sector dialogue is needed to avoid repeating the same mistakes as in the past. Europe has built estates on the edge of cities before, far from jobs, transport and services, and is still living with the results. Where national housing targets count units, cities know a unit is not necessarily a home: where housing units are built, how they are built or rebuilt and how they connect to local amenities is key to a thriving urban economy. Bogota calls this its “Triple Impact Model: housing as an economic engine, a social stabilizer, and an urban regeneration driver”. In other words, unless well planned - in consultation with the local community - and provided with the conditions for its inhabitants to thrive, housing development can be like an invasive plant, causing more harm than good.
The summit came just a couple of weeks after the European Commission presented its proposal for the Affordable Housing Act, the first common European framework for assessing housing measures that affect the single market. This was followed by the publication of “Where Housing Meets Climate”, a very thorough report by Ramboll and C40 Cities that provides practical examples of how cities are aligning their housing and climate goals. The report explores ten different approaches, among which are repurposing brownfield land, and protecting and optimising existing building stock.
At the Holcim Foundation we are supporting these two specific approaches through different partnerships. For example, one of the winning projects in C40’s Reinventing Cities competition, the Ex Macello, Milan’s former slaughterhouse, shows what is possible. The 15-hectare site is being turned into Aria: a new neighbourhood with more than 1,200 affordable homes and a 600-bed student residence, built around 30,000 sqm of restored industrial buildings rather than on cleared land. It aims to be the city’s first carbon-negative district, proof that reusing what we already have can deliver housing people can afford and cut emissions at the same time. You can read more about the Aria project here.
HouseEurope! is working on the same question from the citizens’ side. It has launched a new European Citizens’ Initiative, “Right to Housing! Now and Forever”, which aims to collect one million signatures by 13 September 2027. The initiative argues that the homes of tomorrow are already built, and that what is missing are the rules to convert vacant space, boost renovation and keep homes affordable and sustainable for the long term. You can sign the petition here.
Earlier this year, our Berlin Open Table session with HouseEurope! explored how storytelling can help make the case for change. We look forward to sharing the outputs of this session in our October CityMakers newsletter, and we will be launching a series of case studies in 2027 showing how cities are turning existing building stock into affordable homes.
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Zug, Switzerland
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