Underused buildings - Activating

Through an online platform, run by an architecture office, vacant buildings are brought together with potential users, who in the end buy it as a group and use the building collectively.

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Through a registered private association new tenants are acquired for vacant buildings on a non-commercial basis, bringing owners and tenants together for the reuse of the building.

Activating

Haushalten e.V. is a (...)

Through an independent arts and culture festival every year one abandoned building or site is temporarily occupied, inviting people to visit the building, bringing the place and its history back into the public (...)

Inventimmo.brussels is the largest regularly updated online inventory (website and app) about vacant business premises for sale or rent in Brussels. It is accessed by 200.000 people a year free of charge and informs over 2.000 (...)

Through Summer schools organised by Critical Concrete, an academic and social initiative, socially-relevant spaces – social housing, cultural centres and public spaces – are refurbished.

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To attract people to the vacant site of the Gucetic summer villa and know about their interests for the reuse of the building Dubrovnik organised music and family events.

Activating

Dubrovnik organised music events (...)

Founding of the ‘Agentur StadtWohnen Chemnitz’ (CityLiving Agency Chemnitz) with the goal to coordinate relevant stakeholders and support alternative housing projects in order to enable the sustainable development of unused historic (...)

The project promoted the match making between abandoned industrial buildings with people that looked for living accommodation and work space at affordable prices.

Activating

The Bourse d'Achat project was (...)

The city of Naples, based on the urban commons regulation, initiated a participative process with citizens and neighbourhood organisations to reactive the abandoned military hospital to the “Community Hub Trinità – Active (...)

Brussels has developed a global strategy of actions with a gradual system of tools to first incite and then force the rehabilitation and reuse of vacant buildings. The strategy functions as a cascade. If the 1st tool has not the desired effect, (...)

Ghent city administration facilitated a matchmaking event between local bottom-up initiatives to support the aggregation of richer consortia biding in a call for a 8 months temporary use project of the former city central library.

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The Kypseli Municipal Market was a market of vegetables and fish, built in the 1930s. It operated as a market until the early 1990s in a middle class neighbourhood. Suburbanization, the decline of the area and the proliferation of (...)

Most of the empty spaces in Amersfoort are private properties. Initiatives and owners did not know each other and therefore did not come into contact with each other. A platform was needed and as such, Amersfoort initiated a network with the help (...)

In 2014, the City of Poznan established a particular municipal scheme to facilitate and encourage initiatives to occupy vacant spaces at the same time as refurbishing them: a preferential rate scheme. The scheme aims to support the (...)

The crisis of 2008 stopped the possible development projects of the city of Riga.  Subsequently, many hundreds of buildings with now-theoretical development visions have been left empty, unheated and not decently looked after, (...)

SPAZIO13 is a community experience of social innovation and reuse of a decommissioned public building, having triggered the involvement of residents and stakeholders in the transformation process affecting the neighbourhood. This urban (...)

Confronted with social challenges, like increasing number of elderly, disabled people, and children whose parents work abroad, the City of Vaslui (RO) started a comprehensive process of rehabilitation of six of the former power plants (...)

The City of Aarhus (DK) has been testing the method of including young people in the redevelopment of empty buildings since 2013. By working with physical temporary use, for instance an empty municipal building the future use of which (...)

Located in the north-eastern part of Dusseldorf ’s fringe, Rath consists of heterogeneous housing areas. It still has affordable rents and traditional working- class districts, but it lacks public and green space, has several (...)