European Urban Resilience Forum •• Justice, Inclusion and Societal Resilience: Housing as the Frontline of Climate Adaptation

Insights from EURESFO 2025

EURESFO 2025 in Rotterdam placed resilience firmly in the context of a polycrisis reality, where climate risks intersect with social inequality, housing pressures and political fragmentation. Against this backdrop, discussions increasingly moved beyond systems and infrastructure to ask a more fundamental question: resilience for whom, and under what conditions?

Across sessions, “just resilience” was made concrete at the scale where people live: neighbourhoods and housing systems. This shift reflects a growing recognition that justice is not an add-on to resilience, but a defining condition for whether it can be implemented at all.

This framing aligns with the analysis from the European Environment Agency on “Social fairness in preparing for climate change", which highlights how climate risks and resilience responses are deeply intertwined with social systems such as the built environment, food, water and transport. It reinforces the idea that resilience policies are ultimately distributive: they shape who is protected, who bears costs, and who gains access to safer living conditions.

Housing as a resilience system

Housing discussions consistently moved beyond buildings alone toward a neighbourhood-based approach that integrates physical, socio-cultural, natural and economic dimensions. In this framing, housing is not a standalone sector but part of a wider system shaping health, wellbeing and climate vulnerability.

A key concern was the scale and speed of renovation. With current renovation rates at only around 0.3% of the European building stock per year, participants stressed the need for systemic acceleration rather than incremental improvement. Modular and industrialised approaches were highlighted as potential enablers: while initially more costly, they could reduce time and costs in the long term and improve return on investment.

At the same time, speakers emphasised the need to better define optimal renovation levels and update the data informing these decisions, as outdated datasets no longer reflect current housing realities or climate risks. Beyond energy efficiency, there is also limited understanding of indoor environmental conditions such as air quality, humidity and temperature, and their links to public health outcomes.

This data gap limits the ability to fully assess how housing quality shapes resilience. Participants also stressed that communication must improve: people need to better understand the benefits of retrofitting, heat-proofing and renovation, including through nature-based solutions. Engagement should start early, including with potential renters, to co-develop long-term visions of how people want to live, ensuring alignment between adaptation, mitigation and resilience goals.

Policy coherence was another recurring theme. Aligning housing, energy, climate adaptation and renovation strategies was seen as essential. Existing frameworks such as the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive already move in this direction by integrating affordability considerations, but participants stressed the need to better communicate co-benefits: improved health, lower costs and environmental gains.

Housing transformation in practice

Several city examples illustrated how these principles are being translated into practice.

Barcelona’s strategic housing plan combines social and climate objectives through a multi-layered approach. It includes the development of new housing units alongside measures to guarantee the right to housing and regulate rental prices. At the same time, large-scale home retrofitting is being promoted to reduce emissions, lower energy bills and improve comfort during both heatwaves and cold periods. In this framing, retrofit is not only a decarbonisation measure, but also a form of risk reduction and protection against health and cost-of-living pressures.

The plan is further complemented by a neighbourhood-scale strategy that includes the creation of extensive new green public spaces. Covering around 160 hectares, these interventions aim to reduce urban heat island effects, improve air quality and enhance overall liveability. Together, these measures reflect an integrated understanding of housing, climate and public space as mutually reinforcing systems.

In Rotterdam, the Resilient BoTu programme offered a different but complementary perspective, focusing on long-term neighbourhood transformation driven by community ownership. The programme shifts the narrative away from vulnerability towards shared agency, emphasising local leadership and collective action. BoTu includes a network of community hubs known as “BoTu Living Rooms”, which serve as spaces for connection and interaction across the neighbourhood.

It also includes BoTurisme, a community-led initiative that functions as a local travel agency, and an energy cooperative model that enables residents, including renters without roof access, to participate in shared solar energy systems. Governance is further embedded through the BoTu Council, which is involved in budgeting decisions and project selection.

Furthermore, Rotterdam’s green roof initiatives, including LIFE@Urban Roofs, were discussed as a practical way to make housing more resilient by reducing indoor heat, managing stormwater and improving everyday living conditions. At the same time, participants noted the need to avoid unintended side effects, ensuring these upgrades do not contribute to rising rents or displacement.

Underlying these initiatives is a guiding principle: that strengthening resilience begins with recognising and building on what is already present in communities, rather than focusing solely on deficits.

Inclusion as a precondition for resilience

Inclusion was consistently framed as a prerequisite for resilience rather than an additional objective, particularly in housing contexts where climate risks intersect with existing inequalities. A recurring challenge is that discussions around vulnerability can be uncomfortable for both institutions and communities. However, avoiding them risks excluding precisely those most affected by climate impacts. For this reason, creating safe spaces for dialogue was seen as essential to enable more honest engagement and better-informed policy. At the same time, participants stressed that communication approaches relying solely on negative or dystopian narratives, such as images of flooded homes, tend to be counterproductive and often lead to disengagement. Instead, emphasis was placed on more practical, hopeful and actionable alternatives that can genuinely motivate participation, with one reflection suggesting that rather than labelling communities as vulnerable, it may be more constructive to frame vulnerability as a shared condition that enables more open and constructive conversations.

Building on this, inclusion was also understood as a question of how engagement is structured in practice.

Effective approaches depend on communication accessibility, including plain language, translation into different languages, and adaptation to diverse audiences such as youth or marginalised groups.

Trust was identified as a central condition throughout these discussions, with the recognition that it often sits outside city administrations and within community structures. As a result, engaging vulnerable groups requires working through intermediaries such as voluntary organisations, religious leaders and community champions. This shift also implies a redistribution of power, with greater integration of community voices into planning and decision-making processes, supported by locally grounded approaches that reflect cultural and socio-economic realities and ensure both fairness and effectiveness.

Finally, behavioural change approaches, such as those developed in the PRO-CLIMATE project, reinforced the idea that sustainable behaviour is not only a matter of awareness, but of shaping environments in which such behaviour becomes the default.

Building trust through practice

In Greater Manchester, the Ignition Project’s Eco-street initiative demonstrated how small-scale, community-led interventions can generate broader social and environmental benefits. The initiative invited residents to apply for support to transform underused urban spaces into green areas. Demand was high, with hundreds of expressions of interest and dozens of formal applications, leading to the selection and implementation of pilot projects.

Beyond physical changes, the process strengthened community ties and increased awareness of the benefits of urban nature. Importantly, the approach was designed to be accessible, using clear language and preparatory workshops to support participation. Over time, the model evolved from a competition format to a more targeted approach, where needs are identified in collaboration with city teams and communities are engaged directly in familiar local settings.

Other cities highlighted that meaningful participation takes time. In some cases, years of engagement are required before residents feel comfortable discussing sensitive topics such as flood risk or land use. Experiences from coastal adaptation projects in the Netherlands showed that even when climate change is not explicitly discussed, sustained engagement around local risks can gradually open space for deeper understanding.

Across contexts, a consistent lesson emerged: inclusion is not a one-off process, but a long-term relationship built on trust, consistency and local relevance.

What this opens up for EURESFO 2026

These discussions directly feed into the thematic stream for EURESFO 2026 in Guimarães: People at the centre: just resilience, housing, democracy.

This stream will continue to explore how resilience can be designed, governed and communicated in ways that are inclusive, just and socially transformative. A strong focus will be placed on participatory and bottom-up approaches that meaningfully engage residents and vulnerable groups in decision-making processes.

At the same time, it will not avoid difficult conversations at the intersection of housing, affordability, health, media, (dis)information and post-crisis recovery. Building on Rotterdam’s discussions, the emphasis will be on moving from principles of justice and inclusion to practical governance approaches that embed them into housing systems and everyday urban life.