No Cost Housing Conference

30th June - 1st July 2016, ETH Zurich, ONA Oerlikon

As the world urbanises, city populations grow and rising housing costs make it harder for low-income people to afford homes. Slums, congestion and long commutes have become the accepted reality in cities that are fragmented in wealthy and poor neighbourhoods, a phenomenon that produces asymmetric societies and is in urgent need for alternative paradigms.

We must imagine today what housing can be in an increasingly urban world; contested resources offer a taxonomy that responds not only to conditions resulting from incremental growth, but also to the needs of hundreds of thousands of poor citizens and refugees in recent years. Some of these contemporary challenges raise serious doubts about our capacity to provide appropriate housing solutions under the standards that we have set ourselves for housing. What does housing mean in an urbanising world? What practical solutions do exist? How can we bring back affordable housing to the city centers?  Does low-cost housing mean low quality? Who can contribute what to answer some of the most relevant questions?

The No Cost Housing Conference is hosted and organized by the ETH Wohnforum—ETH CASE at the ONA Building of ETH Zurich in Zurich-Oerlikon. The two-day conference is developed in collaboration with the Hub on Informal Urbanism of UNI (UN-Habitat’s Partnership with Universities Worldwide). It is supported by the ISTP (Institute of Science, Technology and Policy), D-ARCH (Faculty of Architecture of ETH Zurich, Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, Profs. Alfredo Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner) and NSL (Network City and Landscape). The NSL Doctoral Colloquium is included in the Thematic Paper Sessions on the second conference day. The conference's results and insights will lead to a joint statement, submitted to the executive office in preparation of Habitat III in Quito (17.—20. October).