HouseEurope! Open Table

Fellows at the Table

HouseEurope! Open Table

HouseEurope! Open Table

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.

Last updated: October 27, 2026 Berlin, Germany

On June 18, 2026, six Holcim Foundation Fellows (selected from the Foundation’s 2025 fellowship programs in Brussels and London) spent a day with a series of experts at the Deutsches Architektur Zentrum in Berlin for a roundtable workshop. The result is a report, The Open Table: Designing Incentives for Change, published on October 27, 2026, which HouseEurope! will build on in its campaign for European Citymakers to renovate and reuse existing buildings, starting with an event in spring 2027.

The Open Table continued a dialog that began at the Brussels fellowship, whose Fellows concluded that rules on regulation, finance, and tax work only when people trust them and can picture the result. In Berlin, the Fellows read aloud nine short stories they had created, each challenging a myth that one sustainability goal must come at the cost of another, such as building green at the expense of profit. The stories gave a table drawn from very different disciplines a shared language for pension funds, bank risk, and tender law, and in every round the experts moved a story from an individual to a group with agency, since only a group can organize, negotiate, and vote.

Story reading at the HouseEurope! Open Table

Fellows read aloud from nine short stories, each challenging the myth that one sustainability goal must come at the expense of another.

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, a structural engineer in Basel and one of the six Fellows at the table.

Being new to the industry gave the Fellows license to challenge its senior figures from a unique perspective, she says. “It was being given that opportunity to actually ask difficult questions that you wouldn’t normally have as a graduate engineer or architect.”

“They care for the future of the next generation,” Feakins says, noting that the conversations with the experts were constructive and meaningful. What gives her hope, she adds, is senior figures willing to give their time, and the prospect of joint research or a shared vision for the sector. “The Holcim Foundation gives me a bit of hope that we’ve got these groups of fellows that can work towards a more positive future for our built environment.”

Experts at the HouseEurope! Open Table

Experts from policy, property development, culture and academia joined the Fellows at the table, moving each story from an individual hero to a group with agency.

The experts at the table were Oana Bogdan, an architect and Romania’s former Secretary of State for Culture; Julien Dijol, Policy Director of Housing Europe; and Bernard Coomans of the Belgian developer Whitewood. They were joined by public affairs advisor Jens Klarskov of Rud Pedersen Denmark, urban sociologist Joanna Kusiak of the University of Cambridge, Laia Gasch, Director of the World Cities Culture Forum, and Stephan Petermann, editor-in-chief of Volume.

Can Stories Change How We Build? | The Open Table: Designing Incentives for Change

The documentary of Open Table, the second part of Designing Incentives for Change, a project by HouseEurope! with the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction. Its thesis: narratives as infrastructure for change. What people cannot name, they cannot imagine. What they cannot imagine, they will not demand. And what they do not demand, politics and industry will not follow.

The report, The Open Table: Designing Incentives for Change, features all nine stories and the table’s findings:


  • Stories gave participants from very different disciplines a shared language to discuss complex issues.
  • Change depends on groups with agency, not individual heroes.
  • The guide, and the trust a guide depends on, is the actual mechanism of change.
  • The question “who pays?” leads back to the rules that decide where money flows.
  • Even a table assembled to question narratives keeps returning to the narrative of financial return.

Read the full report

The Open Table: Designing Incentives for Change

Link