Right at Home

Spend long enough with the word housing, and it starts to sound thin. Of all the translations I know, the most beautiful is the Spanish hogar: a refuge, a place where you feel safe, a place where you can be yourself. Its root is the Latin for hearth – the fire at the centre of the house.

This year’s World Architecture Day, on 5 October, runs under a motto set by the International Union of Architects: “Housing is a Human Right. Build It.” It falls, as it always does, alongside the United Nations’ World Habitat Day, this year dedicated to “Adequate Housing for All”. Read quickly, the second sentence sounds like an instruction to architects. Read slowly, it is addressed to everyone. To politicians and planners, yes – but also to the people who live in homes, and to their right to build them, or to have them built, with whatever means are at hand. It is not a battle cry for one profession. It is one for everyone involved, and ultimately for each of us. A call that should echo in each person it reaches, and one that carries a certain kind of ownership.

 

“It is not a battle cry for one profession. It is one for everyone involved, and ultimately for each of us.”

 

The feeling of being safe at home has a name. The sociologist Anthony Giddens called it ontological security: the confidence that who we are will continue, and that the world around us will stay, broadly, as it is. Later researchers located it in the home – in constancy, routine, control, a secure base from which to act – and first studied it through home ownership, although, as Vienna shows, security does not depend on owning the walls around you. Its absence can be measured. Longitudinal studies consistently link insecure or inadequate housing with poorer mental health, and UN-Habitat estimates that some 2.8 billion people worldwide lack adequate housing, more than 300 million of them with no home at all. Security, then, is not only a matter of locks and load-bearing walls. It is a state of being.

Here in Barcelona, this is the year of architecture. The city is the UNESCO–UIA World Capital of Architecture 2026 and host of the UIA World Congress, and for months events large and small – panels, talks, exhibitions – have circled the same subject. The city itself is testing its levers: it will not renew the licences of its roughly 10,000 tourist flats when they expire in November 2028, so that they can return to being homes. It is not a cure-all, but it provokes change. It is also needed. Spain’s Youth Council calculates that a young employee would have to spend 98.7 per cent of their net salary to rent a flat alone; in 2025, only 14.5 per cent of 16- to 29-year-olds had managed to leave their parents’ home.

Of the many facts, designs and processes on the table, three stay with me, precisely because they could hardly be more different. Each works a different lever: design, system, process. They are examples, not a complete picture. None of them touches the more than one billion people who live in informal settlements, where the right to housing is most contested – and no single article could cover it all.

Tokyo: the room next door

Around half of Tokyo’s 7.2 million households consist of a single person; in the 23 inner wards, the share is higher still. The city’s smallest homes – self-contained studios of under 20 square metres – make it possible to live without speaking to anyone. The architect Satoko Shinohara calls them a hotbed of social isolation. In 2020, more than 4,000 people in the 23 wards died without anyone looking after them or knowing about them, 1.6 times as many as in 2011. The fear is not only Japanese. In January 2026, a Chinese app called "Are You Dead?" briefly topped the country's paid download charts. Its users tap a button every two days; if they don't, an emergency contact is alerted.

An app can report that someone has stopped answering. A floor plan can place someone next door who would notice. Her response is not new, and that is its strength. The nagaya row houses of the Edo period shared wells and toilets, and with them information and mutual support. Share Yaraicho, the shared house she designed with Ayano Uchimura in 2012, places communal space as a buffer between the smallest private units. The World Health Organization now estimates that loneliness affects one in six people worldwide. What Tokyo shows is that we need solutions that connect the many people who live alone – spaces that respect the wish to be on one’s own, and still open a door.

For practice, the lesson is a design parameter: shared space placed between the smallest private units, planned from the first sketch rather than added at the end.

Vienna: a decision that still holds

Vienna shows that solutions from the past can carry into the present. Around 220,000 municipal flats and roughly 200,000 subsidised homes built by limited-profit associations house about half of the city’s population. The model reaches back to Red Vienna in the 1920s, yet it has not stopped: limited-profit developers still add around 5,000 homes a year. Because the middle classes live there too, social housing carries little stigma, and its sheer scale steadies rents across the whole market. It is not flawless – access remains bureaucratic, and residents with migrant backgrounds are under-represented. It can be revised. But it stands. Security here comes from tenure, not title. A study published by the Vienna Chamber of Labour finds that, despite higher density and faster population growth, Vienna has considerably lower housing-cost burdens and markedly higher residential satisfaction than Hamburg or Berlin. The pressure is real here too: asking rents on the city’s private market rose by around ten per cent in 2025.

It also raises the less glamorous questions behind any housing model, questions that its many variations in other cities have to answer too: how much land a city owns, how much it has handed over to third parties, how its finances are structured overall. Let’s look up north, in Helsinki, where the municipality owns around 70 per cent of the land, that ownership has allowed the city to house people first and solve other problems afterwards. There are possibilities. That is what Vienna shows.

For architects, the lesson lies upstream of the drawing. Land, finance and procurement are design questions too, and those who stay out of them leave the brief to others.

HouseEurope!: the second attempt

The third example is not a building but a process. In 2025, the architects Olaf Grawert and Arno Brandlhuber launched HouseEurope!, a European Citizens’ Initiative calling for laws that would make renovating and transforming existing buildings easier, cheaper and fairer than tearing them down. It needed one million signatures within a year. When collection closed on 31 January 2026, it had fallen far short. It could be signed online, in minutes, from anywhere in the EU; days before the deadline it stood at fewer than 80,000 signatures. Its initiators were architects – a reminder that the profession can start processes, not only deliver projects.

In September, a broader coalition launched a successor, “Right to Housing! Now and Forever”, built on a simple argument: the homes of tomorrow have already been built. It now covers not only renovation but finance and access. It may not succeed at the first attempt either. But change that begins more complex, more comprehensive and slower may, in the end, run deeper. Processes are not getting any easier, even though we have every possible tool at our disposal. Persistence may be one of the most important qualities we have to protect.

 

“Persistence may be one of the most important qualities we have to protect.”

 

Ownership

Architects already do much of this. In conversions, in new builds, in renovations, they bend budgets, regulations and habits towards something better – At Grand Parc in Bordeaux, Anne Lacaton’s practice transformed 530 social flats without asking a single resident to move out – proof that “build it” need not mean building new, and that people can stay while the building changes. Lacaton has said it plainly: architects must have clear positions on housing. The greater obstacle, the Brussels architect Laurens Bekemans, architect and co-founder of BC architects & studies & materials, told me after the UIA congress, is not the law but habit.

What is missing is not examples. It is ownership: the values we demand at the political level, carried into the way each project is handled and delivered. With courage, a great deal can change.

 

“What is missing is not examples. It is ownership.”

 

Ownership, though, is not a professional privilege. It is a call to everyone. Take responsibility – as a resident, as a client, as an architect, or in whatever role you hold, and with the means you have. Those means are not equal: a young renter in Barcelona cannot carry what a city or a developer can. Housing concerns us all.