If Britain Wants Cool New Social Housing, It Should Look To The Continent

In Britain, as our government has promised, we’re going to have a “council housing revolution”, the building of as yet unknown numbers of homes at genuinely affordable rents, a return to policies of 50 and more years ago in order to address the well-known housing crisis. Which is welcome. It also raises the question of what these homes may be like, of their quality as well as their quantity, whether they are stacked-up accumulations of units or places that contribute to their communities and enrich the lives of their inhabitants.

Luckily there are, close at hand, outstanding examples of how this might be done, in cities and countries on the continent of Europe. In many of these places, public bodies and architects see their job as doing more than meeting numbers of homes completed. They also want to make beautiful places to live, sustainable to build and run, with homes planned to suit contemporary ways of living, and with shared and public spaces given as much importance as the private interiors. They seek to reduce environmental impacts by using natural materials, and to adapt existing buildings where possible rather than demolish them. They aim to reduce the costs of heating and air conditioning almost to zero – a simple-enough ambition, and extremely important to their tenants.

In Vienna, a city with a history of ambitious public housing going back a century, not-for-profit housing organisations plan affordable apartment blocks where produce can be grown on their roofs and in their courtyards, irrigated by waste water, and then sold in a ground-floor shop. Communal kitchens and workshops are also included with housing developments, to help make them into communities rather than mere stacks of residential units.

In Paris, on the Quai de Valmy, there’s a canalside warehouse conversion that, with exposed brick vaults and light-filled rooms, looks for all the world like another block of luxury lofts for well-off professionals. It’s actually social housing, completed in 2022. In the heart of the same city is the Îlot Saint-Germain development, an old office block that has been made into light-filled homes – also social housing, completed last year – with the help of a deep layer of balconies. Both projects are by the same architect, François Brugel and Associates. In another part of the city, Déchelette Architecture have designed and recently completed an apartment block with a timber structure and rammed earth walls, the materials of desert villages imported to the stone city of Baron Haussmann, in the interests of a stylish kind of ecology.

But some of the most remarkable public housing is now being built in Spain. In Mallorca they build social housing with locally quarried stone – solid stone – not out of reckless extravagance, but because it’s a sustainable and durable material. In Barcelona there’s a shelter for homeless women with warm wooden interiors and generous loggias, designed by Vivas Arquitectos, enriched with ceramic tiles and silvery aluminium cladding. The architecture speaks of calm and care, not desperation and last resorts.

The Barcelona architects Marta Peris and José Toral say they design “social housing that looks like housing for rich people”. They also express a belief, widespread among those who commission and design such projects, that public investment should take a lead for private developers to follow, to “create examples that benefit the rest of society”.

Philip Oldfield, a professor of architecture who studies European housing projects from faraway Sydney and regularly fills his X feed with inspirational examples, admires “the consistency of design excellence in Barcelona, how every project uses effective design strategies that improve occupant comfort and quality of life”. Apartments, he points out, are rarely organised along a long central corridor but instead around communal atria or courtyards, with all homes having dual aspects.

A good place to see what these attitudes make possible is La Chalmeta, a cooperative apartment block in Marina del Prat Vermell, a new district of both public and private housing in an old industrial area, where almost 30,000 people are expected to live. The project is the result of an initiative by the former mayor Ada Colau, whereby the city government donates plots of land to cooperative organisations for periods of 75 years, while also supporting them with loans from a public bank, the Catalan Institute of Finance. Residents can live there for a down payment of €40,000 (£33,000) – which can be reduced in individual cases by public subsidies – and a monthly charge of €650 for a three-bedroom flat, but if they want to move out, they have to return their stake for its original value. They can’t speculate, in other words, on rises in the housing market.

For Tomoko Sakamoto, who lives there with her partner, David, and their two teenage children, the attraction of La Chalmeta is not only its affordability but its community spirit. In an experience typical of what she calls Barcelona’s “very severe housing crisis”, they found themselves having to move home repeatedly in the face of rent increases of up to 50%. She also “started to imagine how I might live when I grow old, when I might be alone”.

Cooperative living means that everyone knows everyone else. They share access to a studio for remote working, courtyard gardens, a carpentry workshop, a rooftop for such things as yoga and meditation, a massage studio, bike storage, a room for meetings, events and (if desired) communal meals, as well as shared washing machines and DIY tools, which spare everyone the need to keep such things in their flat. Residents make decisions together about the management of the building, including the construction of solar panels on the roof, installed by them after the main construction works were complete. Neighbours can spontaneously ask each other for help and support.

The building’s spare and lean design, by Pau Vidal and Vivas Arquitectos, concentrates on making spaces that enhance its collective life. It consists of an eight-storey and a four-storey block, connected by staircases and access decks wide enough for people to pause and chat, with views through and across the building and courtyards for ventilation and daylight. This approach augments the spaces within the well-planned but compact apartments, the common areas being in effect extensions of home. Another resident, Antje, tells how her children can roam freely about the block. Sharing and collaboration in a co-housing project, she says, helps address the challenges of raising small children, with which too many families too often struggle on their own.

Cooperative living isn’t for everyone. You have to be up for the joint decision-making and be able to make the initial payment. Such developments also take time to organise and build – a total of seven years in the case of La Chalmeta – which doesn’t make them the most effective way of meeting urgent need. For these reasons, cooperative housing is only part of much wider efforts to create dignified affordable homes in and around Barcelona. They are driven by the pressures of a city where prices have risen dramatically, intensified by its popularity with tourist and buyers of second homes. There is a historical need to make up for lost time. Policies started under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco directed public resources into subsidising homes for sale – with the aim of turning “proletarians” into “proprietors” – which means that there is not a large stock of affordable homes for rent.

Barcelona is also a city with a proud history of architecture, going back at least to Antoni Gaudí and his contemporaries, revived and celebrated in the renewal of the city around the time that it hosted the 1992 Olympics. Much of this pride and energy now goes into housing. Architectural competitions give younger architects the chance to contribute, and the opportunity for new ideas to be put into practice. “We have a culture of architecture as a public service,” says Anna Puigjaner of the architects Maio. “We feel privileged. We get respect.”

There are public agencies such as Impsol (the Metropolitan Institute of Land Development and Property Management), which builds and runs social housing in the metropolitan area around Barcelona, and whose bland acronymic title conceals a willingness to experiment. It receives no public subsidy, apart from the sites provided by local authorities, so has to be financially self-sufficient, but this doesn’t stop its ambitions for sustainability and what it calls “social innovation”. “In the end, it’s a matter of changing society,” is how Josep Maria Borrell, who leads its architectural work, describes its purpose.

The organisation has commissioned projects such as Maio’s block of 40 units in the suburb of Sant Feliu de Llobregat, a low-cost building in which little space goes to waste, made special by balconies shaded from the sun by large drapes, and an intriguing and curvaceous entrance hall – a sort of whitewashed roughcast cave – which, as Puigjaner puts it, “makes you feel you’re entering an amazing place”. Impsol is also responsible for a block by Peris+Toral in nearby Cornellà de Llobregat, a timber structure with a “non-hierarchical” arrangement of rooms of a kind that has become widespread. Rather than an array of large and small, of living room, master bedroom, second bedroom and kitchen, all are the same size, allowing people to live in them in different ways. They are connected by double doors rather than corridors, which increases the sense of space.

As impressive as the Barcelona projects are, they might arguably be expected in and near what is a sophisticated and largely prosperous city. More surprising, almost out of the blue, is a bold programme of building social housing in the Balearic Islands. Here, homes are made radical by going back to basics, by using marés sandstone from local quarries and posidonia seagrass from the beaches – materials employed in the middle ages – to build modern structures of exceptional levels of sustainability. Ibavi (the Balearic Institute of Housing), the agency responsible, has just been recognised by the Royal Academy in London, which awarded its annual architecture prize to the organisation’s former managing director Cris Ballester Parets.

Trained as an economist, she had the job of addressing a housing need that was rated in 2019 as the worst in Spain, and to energise the previously torpid output of new homes in the Balearics. It took seven years on average to deliver a project, from the acquisition of the site to the handing over of door keys to new residents. Her target was to provide 1,500 new homes in four years (of which 1,300 have been achieved or are on the way) – almost the same again as the existing stock of 1,750. “All the people involved,” she says, “wanted to build the most amount of houses in the least time possible because of [the] housing emergency.”

At the same time, she and her colleagues wanted to invest in the islands’ industry, encouraging quarries to expand their production and construction companies to train local people in half-forgotten skills. It was a collaborative endeavour – until it was curtailed by the rightwing government that came to power in the Balearic Islands last year – involving architects, suppliers, builders and administrators. Their work wasn’t only a question of design, but also of addressing the legal and regulatory obstacles to their unorthodox approach.

And she and her colleagues, Parets says, wanted to get away from the kind of social housing that says: “Here poor people live”, as if they were “the part of society that we do not want”. As a result of this work: “People feel more integrated and they appreciate that very much. It gives power. That is mental health.” They also wanted to plan interconnected communities where residents’ awareness of each other’s lives would, among other things, reduce the probability of domestic violence.

The outcomes of all these hopes include the Salvador Espriu development in Palma, 19 two-storey stone houses arranged around a pedestrianised street whose trees will provide shade and cooling, and where there’s an easy flow from the porches and balconies of the homes into the shared open space. Inside, the stone is formed into vaults of almost monastic serenity. Breezes blowing from one side of the building to the other, and the mass of the masonry, keep the interior temperatures stable, to the extent that Ibavi felt able to omit both heating and air conditioning, thereby saving money that could be spent on the quality of the construction and drastically reducing energy bills. Parets reports some scepticism from the residents. “They were kind of: ‘Hmm, it won’t work here,’” she says, “but after a year and a half, they all replied the same: in summer there is no heat and in winter it is not cold.”

Other Ibavi projects have central atria that extract warm air and make further experiments with sustainable materials. An apartment block in Palma, now being built to the designs of the Barcelona-based H Arquitectes, is made out of rubble from a building formerly on the site, mixed with lime to form building blocks. They all embody a rare fusion of the idealistic and the technical, their beauty coming not from forced architectural gestures, but from serious if unusual responses to essential issues.

As for Britain, it’s not that the country is completely without quality when it comes to social housing, as Chowdhury Walk in the London borough of Hackney, a thoughtful row of two-storey houses shortlisted for this year’s Stirling prize, shows. But there’s a level of imagination and determination in some of the best European projects, combined with a breadth of vision that includes the social as well as the functional aspects of housing, that our risk-averse public agencies have yet to match. If there’s really going to be a revolution in council housing, we would do well to learn from the best examples on our continent.