SHAPE-EU with its own stand at the International Social Housing Festival in Helsinki

30-06-2022

A city the housing world looks up to, reconnecting after almost three years of working from the screen, passion to deliver affordable and future-proof decent housing, sharing new challenges and experiences, one-to-one opportunities to re-connect, sunshine and seagulls.

This was the third International Social Housing Festival (ISHF).

After two years of planning, from the 14th to the 17th June 2022, it was finally showtime.

About 1,000 public, cooperative, social housing providers, city authorities, EU policymakers, bankers, urbanists, architects, and researchers came to Helsinki to celebrate smart housing policies and discuss how we can overcome the multiple challenges ahead of the sector.

The Festival explored housing as the foundation of good life. It brought together three main themes and linked the public, cooperative, social, community-led housing sector to the rest of the vast world around it, making it clear that housing can never stand on its own.

This was an excellent opportunity for the project to reach out to social and affordable housing providers from Europe and beyond.

Would you like to understand and implement our solutions to…

attract investment to fund lighthouse renovation districts?
team up with local authorities for the uptake of new technologies targeting social and affordable housing?
ensure energy efficiency at district-level by combining different sources of energy and respecting the rules?
involve residents and tenants in the process of renovating social and affordable homes?
make our society more inclusive by creating city districts where different generations, the youth, the elderly, single parents, people with disabilities or other vulnerabilities, and everyone can live well together and feel empowered?

These were some of the main questions Housing Europe’s Innovation and Projects team, João Gonçalves and Clara Mafé were ready to respond to at the stand of the European Affordable Housing Consortium: Sustainable Housing for Social Impact (SHAPE-EU).

The project is becoming the point of reference for a socially-inclusive Renovation Wave and New European Bauhaus. It is coordinated by Housing Europe and co-funded by the European Union’s Single Market Programme to support social housing providers, public authorities, and SMEs to deliver social and affordable housing district renovations, which include innovative features. The services include support on how to choose and incorporate adequate new technologies, the best options to renovate multi-apartment buildings in a cost-efficient way, financial solutions for specific cases, how to foster social innovation or how to digitise social housing service provision and many others.