SYMPOSIUM "Common Housing Futures" I 25. & 26. September 2025

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM „Common Housing Futures“

Date: 25. and 26.September 2025

Organiser: FG Architecture Cities Economies | Re:Building Economy and Project Development, University of Kassel, Germany

Concept: Prof. Dr. Gabu Heindl, MA arch. Iva Marčetić

Entrance free, English language

During the two day symposium “Common Housing Futures” through inputs and panels we will combine the critical housing theory with the imaginative aspects of the projective design. The program will be organised in the Campus of University of Kassel as a combination of discussions and inputs from invited guests. The discussions will be focused on the specific scenarios regarding the future of housing based on needs and demands articulated in the existing movements. The aim of the discussions is to open discursive engagement between different disciplines and ways of encountering the question of housing. The inputs will speak to the latest work within the housing writing and research and panels will open a joint discursive engagement. 

Speakers: Dubravka Sekulić, David Madden, Justin Kadi, Susanne Heeg, Gabu Heindl, Andrej Holm, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Florine Schüschke, Jovana Timotijević, Joanna Kusiak, Sarah Klosterkamp, Anne Kockelkorn, Iva Marčetić and others

About the Symposium:

After decades of municipal and state investments gradually reshaped to accommodate financial markets that trade in public assets, rather than invest in tangible needs such as infrastructure improvements, including housing - today we are witnessing a change in the mainstream rhetoric that speaks to recognizing public entities as crucial actors in housing supply. As a consequence of the chronic housing unaffordability, states and cities are trying to create public supply countermeasures with even the European commission finally including housing into its portfolio of competencies and naming the first European housing commissioner. 

However, as Leilani Farha explains: “Housing is positioned at the center of a historic structural transformation in global investment and the economies of the industrialized world”, making it impossible to design housing affordability without challenging this transformation and its ownership and governance systems. Many public entities are reaching for the logic of housing systems of the previous century. But, even if that were possible, a simple return to the 20th century - style - housing - relief that comes in the form of public supply through building would require a significant housing construction boom and consequently a significant carbon footprint. Simply put - building more of the same hardly seems like a sustainable solution. 

Critical housing research of the last twenty years has shaped the scholarly analysis about the causes and effects of the housing crisis, but it proves challenging to project  the comprehensible future of housing relations based on the material analysis. As teachers, practitioners and writers, we, the department of Architecture Cities Economies, wonder about the possible narratives of the future of housing in order to be able to teach, practice and write about homes. Therefore we are organizing a Symposium that does not claim to offer solutions, but wants to correlate the disciplines of projective design that is at the core of architectural thought, with the knowledge coming from the field of both academia and activism. Our aim is to shape a discussion on housing that speaks to a path forward based on analysis, a discussion  that can broaden the horizons of academic thinking when it comes to imagining the future of ownership and governance over land and housing resources.