In the face of pressing affordable housing shortages, vacant residential buildings and units represent a promising resource. Their reuse could help address housing deficits while also contributing to circularity strategies in urban development. However, reusing residential vacancies is a complex process that involves stakeholders from diverse disciplines, interests, and institutional backgrounds.
This presentation builds on preliminary insights from interviews conducted with key stakeholder groups involved in the reuse of residential vacancies in Cairo, Egypt, and Athens, Greece. The stakeholders interviewed include property owners, investors, government representatives, building professionals, users, and representatives from community and civil society organizations.
The interviews explored stakeholders’ perspectives on the importance of reusing residential vacancies, the challenges they encounter in the reuse process, and the difficulties that arise in interactions with other stakeholders. Although Cairo and Athens represent different urban contexts governed by distinct regulatory and institutional systems, several similarities in the challenges surrounding the reuse of residential vacancies can still be observed. These similarities relate, for example, to cultural norms and inheritance-related issues affecting property ownership, which often paralyze decision-making and stall reuse projects.
Lamia Ghoz
Hybrid seminar
Join in situ: National Centre for Social Research, 9 Kratinou str., 10552 Athens (4th floor)
Join online: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/31000789182296?p=dzbxn0EH8gv8JA8G7W
Meeting ID: 310 007 891 822 96
Passcode: 3iW3Ji39
The presentation of Lamiaa Ghoz is part of the seminar series Cities Lately of the LaSTcity which aims to contribute to the contemporary dialogue about cities as places that never cease to change. We engage in discussions with researchers from Greece and abroad about the shifting urban landscapes and their dynamic impacts on social organization and social life. We raise questions about new inequalities, divisions and displacements; about the redefinition of the city’s boundaries and its relationship with nature; about the economy of the city and the forms of its crisis; about spatial justice and the forms of its claims; about the new processes of producing the built environment; and about institutions and mechanisms of urban governance. About cities that suffocate, cities that breathe, and about everything… that is transforming (again) in cities lately.