COVID Briefs Building back better: post-pandemic city governance

Towards a post-pandemic housing policy for cities

Raquel Rolnik

Professor, Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, Brazil

@raquelrolnik

Eva Garcia Chueca

Senior researcher, Global Cities Programme, CIDOB

@eva_gchueca

The structural problems of access to adequate housing, which became clearer after the onset of the global economic crisis of 2008, have worsened during the pandemic when having access to adequate housing has become a basic condition for protecting lives. COVID-19 has forced governments to adopt a series of emergency measures by means of which they have intervened in residential markets and have, for example, mobilized an already existing, but either empty or underused, housing stock in order to provide homes for people without proper housing conditions. The political opening that has appeared during the pandemic with the adoption of measures that would have been unthinkable beforehand offers an opportunity for local (but also regional and national) governments to go further with their political action in upholding the right to adequate housing. The guidelines suggested with this report include extending the emergency measures adopted during the pandemic and continuing to work on certain earlier measures that involved intervening in residential markets.

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