We are pleased to inform you that Artchitectours starts a new collaboration with the expert architect in urbanism Maria Sisternas. Maria is an architect by the Etsab-UPC and MSc City Design and Social Sciences by the London School of Economics. She has worked as a freelance and for the administration, in the Barcelona City Council and the Generalitat de Catalunya. She promotes affordable housing projects and writes about current urban issues in the newspaper Diario ARA and other specialized media.
The architect, in addition to collaborating in the creation of contents of architectural interest, will be our architect guide and lecturer expert in urbanism, in the Girona Tours that she is finishing designing for Artchitectours, and that we will soon offer, as another interesting architectural tour at urban and landscape level of the Spanish territory to visit.
Sisternas, in his LinkedIn makes a very interesting comparison on the urban planning of Denmark, taking as an example the Danish model to highlight the shortcomings on the financial aid that Catalonia suffers in this field, making a review of the urban confirmation in the territory of Catalonia.
“Denmark has 6 million inhabitants. Its Third Sector (non-profit) has an affordable housing stock of 570,000 homes for families, 35,000 for young people and 42,000 for the elderly. 1 in 6 Danes live in housing built by non-profit developers.
In this process, urban planning and the public purchase of land have played a decisive role. Cooperatives and limited-profit companies have been able to operate on land in cities that the administrations have adapted with many criteria to guarantee the right to habitat.
In Catalonia, cities have not been enlarged or new sectors requalified: the PTSH estimates that the urban planning exploited by workers (POUMs) has generated or will generate money to build more than 210,000 subsidized housing units in Catalonia. There is land (you will see empty plots walking around all Catalan cities), both owned by municipalities and the Generalitat through Incasol, but what is lacking is money to help finance housing developments at affordable prices, with long term returns (30 years, a generation).
The key is to help make the numbers viable outside Barcelona, encourage affordable rentals above all (the for-sale HPO does not expand the public stock), demand that the deadlines set in the plan are completed, and make sure that what is built is of excellent quality, especially in terms of sustainability.” Article written by Maria Sisternas.
