RE-HOME

RE-HOME addresses a central paradox of Europe’s housing crisis: while the need for affordable and adequate housing continues to grow, millions of homes and buildings remain vacant or underused.

The project explores how reusing and adapting existing buildings can contribute to more affordable, sustainable and inclusive forms of housing, while reducing the need for new land and the embodied carbon associated with construction.

RE-HOME brings together four municipalities and their local consortia in Chalandri (Greece), Mechelen (Belgium), La Rochelle (France) and Hrastnik (Slovenia) to co-design place-based strategies for transforming existing buildings and spaces. These strategies will be grounded in the principles of sufficiency and adaptability, as well as the values of the New European Bauhaus.

In Chalandri, the project will focus on the adaptive reuse of refugee heritage housing, exploring how existing spaces can be given new life and respond to contemporary housing needs. The other pilot cities will explore different approaches, including home-sharing and co-living solutions, the division of large underused privately owned homes into smaller housing units to meet the housing needs of more people, densification combined with biodiversity-friendly gardens, and the reactivation of vacant municipal housing for social groups experiencing systemic vulnerabilities.

Through participatory processes, community diagnostics, design and creative storytelling, RE-HOME will support municipalities and local actors in identifying and unlocking the potential of vacant and underused spaces. The project will also introduce housing micro-experiments in additional European cities, provide training and mentoring for local actors, and develop a transferable methodology and toolkit for housing transformation.

By bringing these different approaches together, RE-HOME aims to develop practices that can be adapted and replicated across different contexts, contributing to more inclusive and sustainable cities and a fairer approach to housing.