Collective housing Protected Housing

Thinking about the future is always an opportunity to realize the contributions made so far, the unresolved needs, and the priorities that must be planned. Housing in general, and also public housing, despite the current economic context, is not thought of only as a product that satisfies our housing needs, but as a commodity to be sold, a capital that has future expectations and incorporates the value of the urban it generates. Housing is not spoken of as a social need, but as another object of the market. If in one hundred years of construction of social housing we observe that access to housing for the classes with fewer resources was never considered solved, and continues to be a problem, it is necessary to reflect on the solutions given. With that intention we promoted this website and the publication of the book VIVIENDA COLECTIVA VIVIENDA PROTEGIDA emerged, of which you can see extracts on the website.

With the desire to continue generating debate, we have just organized a small exhibition at the Department of Housing of the Xunta de Galicia about social housing, present, past, and future, a summary through 37 actions carried out in Galicia between 1911-2012 , an image that we think of as traveling, with the possibility of growing, and with the intention of creating opinion wherever it is shown. Along with images of her, we publish here an excerpt of our collaboration in the cultural program MIRAXES from TVG, thanking his team for the interest they put in portraying some of the social housing neighborhoods, their transformation, and the people who are contributing a creative vision of their environment.

Access to housing is one of the most important concerns to be resolved socially, but at the level of architectural debate, territory and city are also issues that new generations of architects approach with the curiosity to understand in order to stimulate the context of our projects, accepting a sad position of spectators, aware of the current impossibility of decision on the mechanisms that regulate them and the inertia that the economy and the market impose. For some time now, architects have retreated from design, towards the interior of the space that surrounds our buildings, leaving us out of a debate that left society orphaned from a more humanistic vision in providing solutions to improve the habitability of buildings. environments that we use, and the definition of the great concepts that give meaning to our profession, such as the meaning of inhabiting, or building. That is why the debate that is projected today from architecture is not social, it is objectual and spatial, even among the architects most aware of their social function, the solutions provided only attempt to clean up the designed product, seeking a better relationship between its cost and the use value, rethinking the block again and again.

This exhibition, the existence of this website, a book, any means does little to talk about the need for housing for everyone. But it is not enough to transform the current situation. Faced with the virtual world that drives consumption, and the growing individualism of Western society, the number of people who need housing and cannot pay for it is increasing. This dichotomy, between desire and need, makes us think about a future that can change if society takes center stage in making decisions that affect their coexistence and well-being. Housing should be a social good, like education and health, can this be possible? There are examples...