Green Transition and Housing Inequalities: Context and Uneven Outcomes

Roberta Cucca (NMBU) opened the Habitat Swiss Conference hosted by the University of Lausanne with a keynote addressing the growing challenges of housing inequalities in the context of the green and digital transition. 

The presentation brought together insights from ongoing research on urban inequalities and shared preliminary findings from the RehousIn project.

The keynote focused on a key question at the heart of the RehousIn project: how can housing systems support socially just green and digital transitions? While policies aimed at decarbonizing buildings and promoting sustainable urban development are increasingly central to European agendas, they can also generate new forms of inequality if their social implications are not carefully considered.

Drawing on emerging results from the project, the talk discussed how these transitions interact with existing patterns of socio-spatial inequality, potentially affecting access to affordable housing and shaping new forms of housing precarity. Particular attention was given to the governance challenges that cities face when attempting to combine climate goals with social justice.