Track: Housing - Renovation, Retrofit, Reuse

Barcelona’s approach to complex housing renovation, combining public support, building rehabilitation, neighbourhood regeneration, and community engagement.

Some buildings cannot be effectively rehabilitated through conventional grant schemes alone. Fragmented ownership, vulnerable households, technical deficiencies, limited management capacity and wider neighbourhood challenges can combine to prevent renovation from taking place. Barcelona’s approach to complex buildings addresses these barriers through a more intensive model of public intervention, combining technical, social and financial support to make rehabilitation possible. This presentation will explore how public authorities can intervene when building renovation becomes not only a construction challenge, but also a question of governance, social support and long-term neighbourhood regeneration.

Barcelona’s experience in housing rehabilitation brings together many of the challenges cities face when upgrading existing homes: ageing buildings, complex ownership structures, vulnerable households, limited investment capacity, and the need for coordination between public authorities, property managers, and residents. Through the city’s work on complex buildings and neighbourhood regeneration, the session will explore how local tools, public support, and community engagement can make rehabilitation more feasible, inclusive, and effective, turning Barcelona’s practice into a broader conversation on urban housing renewal.

Building-scale rehabilitation of existing housing stock, addressing energy efficiency, accessibility, housing quality, thermal comfort, and the financial mechanisms needed to make those renovations viable.

The majority of the homes that will exist in most cities in 2050 have already been built. Rehabilitating them —improving energy performance, accessibility, structural safety, and housing quality— is one of the most pressing and complex challenges of urban housing policy. At the same time, ageing housing stock is both a social challenge and a climate opportunity, especially when inefficient or inaccessible buildings are occupied by lower-income or elderly households with limited capacity to invest in improvements. The session will address how cities can scale renovation and retrofit through coordinated action between governments, building owners, residents, finance institutions, and the construction sector, ensuring that upgrades improve affordability, quality of life, and neighbourhood resilience.

The most challenging housing conditions are often concentrated in specific neighbourhoods, where poor building quality, limited services, social vulnerability, and urban disconnection overlap. Addressing them requires more than physical rehabilitation and construction investment: it calls for integrated regeneration strategies that combine housing, public space, services, mobility, community engagement, and long-term public investment. The session will focus on how cities can design and deliver neighbourhood-scale regeneration that addresses both the physical and social dimensions of urban vulnerability, improving living conditions, strengthening local communities, and avoiding displacement.

Integrated regeneration strategies at neighbourhood scale, combining housing, public space, services, social inclusion, and communitybased approaches, while addressing the financing tools needed to make transformation viable in vulnerable areas.