This talk will present insights from ongoing research in the framework of the ReHousIn project («Contextualised pathways to Reduce Housing Inequalities in the Green Transition»). Setting the scene by giving an overview of policies promoting densification and energy refurbishments in Switzerland, we will then focus on their implementation and their interlinkages with market dynamics in Zurich, specifically in Altstetten. This neighbourhood was officially designated as one of the priority areas for densification and has been undergoing profound transformations in recent years, which have increasingly been accompanied by detrimental consequences for the inhabitants of the renewed buildings.

Hannah Widmer is a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Wohnforum – ETH CASE in the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. As a sociologist and human geographer, her research focuses on the influence of environmental and energy policies on housing inequalities, regional effects of housing shortages, processes of inclusion and exclusion in public space.

“Who owns the city?” is one of the central questions in the early stages of planning any transformation of public space. This question becomes even more critical when implementing structural interventions such as Nature-Based Solutions (NBS). The knowledge of ownership structures plays a crucial role not only in terms of approval processes but also in addressing property owners as potential participants in such initiatives.

The PLOVGIS project aims to combine ownership data with open government data to analyze the potential for vertical greening in public space on a city-wide level. It seeks to identify both opportunities and limitations of this combined data by comparing it to actual publicly funded greening projects on private property. In doing so it also narrows down the role of the ownership structure in the context of urban climate adaptation strategies.

Maximilian Wonaschütz is a pre-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Urban and Regional Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His work adopts a predominantly spatial-technological perspective, focusing on ownership structures within the built environment. In particular, he investigates their interrelations with the socio-demographic composition of neighborhoods, as well as the effects of an increasingly commodified housing market on patterns of property ownership