News & Events: Conference: Housing Meets Climate: Responsible City at RC21 Vienna 2026 (20-22 July 2026)

By Maxime Felder on Tue, Aug 4, 2026

That convergence is a good sign for a project like ours: the questions we are asking are being asked in many places at once, and the eco-social paradox appears in many different variants. Decarbonising the housing stock is unavoidable. Yet the very measures that make buildings greener – retrofits, renovations, demolition and replacement construction – routinely raise rents, displace tenants, and redistribute costs onto those least able to carry them.

The Housing – Climate Nexus

Responsible City team members Frances Brill, Maxime Felder and Jacob Geuder convened a session on The Housing – Climate Nexus: Conflicts, Controversies, and Alternatives, with colleagues from Barcelona, Dr Lorenzo Vidal and Carlos Delclós.
Eight papers were presented, spanning cases in Glasgow, Marseille, Prague, Vienna, Graz, Geneva, Brussels, Berlin, London, Montreal and New Delhi. The geographic spread mattered: it made visible how differently the same tension plays out depending on tenure structures, regulatory regimes and the position of a city within global property markets. Researchers asked who pays for the transition, who benefits from it, and which alternatives are treated as realistic.

Other sessions approached the same questions through the social consequences of energy-efficient retrofitting, renovation and replacement construction – practices that have become central to the urban decarbonisation agenda. One was devoted to Affordable Housing within Planetary Boundaries: Crossing East – West and North – South Divides, the other to Housing Decarbonisation as a Field of Capital Accumulation.

A session on Theorising and Practicing Housing Justice: Novel Definitions and Emancipatory Epistemologies hosted two contributions from RC.

Luca Pattaroni and Maxime Felder presented a newly completed paper on housing responsibility regimes. They argued that responsibility is where justice becomes operable, or fails to. Focusing on Geneva, the paper shows how competing understandings of housing justice coexist and contradict one another, how they are not equally powerful: each rests on more or less established material and institutional footings. Responsibility regimes also differ in the scope of what they answer for, varying in spatial range, temporal range and causal depth. Making these explicit helps explain why actors arrive at incompatible conclusions, and why some claims stick while others don’t.

In the same session, Nouri Abdelgadir presented a paper co-authored with Frances Brill which argues that how housing crises are narrated shapes whose precarity becomes visible and which responses are rendered possible. The paper shows how Zurich’s housing crisis is framed through narratives of low vacancy and of evictions. These crises turn out to be co-constitutive: responses to one intensify the other. Their negotiation exposes crisis as a discursive practice that does not merely describe conditions but actively organises the material conditions of financialised housing.

Ismene Ehrler presented her research on tenants’ responses to the material and social destruction of their home on the panel Care and Contention: Local Activism and Urban Inequality. Her contribution underlines how the maintenance and repair of private apartments, as well as the collective political organisation of neighbours, represent acts of care in a context where the future of one’s home is put into question by the owner’s development projects.

What we take away

Vienna showed us that the housing – climate relationship is no longer a niche concern, and empirical work is accumulating fast. Across presentations, we heard empirical analysis and attempts to move beyond documenting situated versions of the same paradox: in liberal housing markets, housing justice and climate justice appear incompatible.

Public authorities are unwilling or unable to compel owners to decarbonise the housing stock while at the same time requiring them not to raise housing costs. In an increasingly financialised market, housing needs to be profitable – for shareholders, or for the pension funds that invest in it. Authorities encourage and incentivise retrofit and low-carbon construction, but since they more often pursue cost-cutting and austerity agendas than large-scale public investment, their action remains of limited effect. Each side keeps passing the hot potato to the other: public authorities ask private actors to take their responsibility, and private actors reply that decarbonisation and affordable housing are not primarily their responsibility.

The Responsible City project aims to shed light on these mechanisms by focusing on controversies over the who and the how, and by offering a conceptual vocabulary to describe them.

Our thanks to the organisers in Vienna, to our co-convenors in Barcelona, and to everyone who presented and discussed with us over the three days.