How can we talk about housing in Europe, where housing policy has increasingly been subordinated to market logic and is based less and less on care and solidarity? This bilingual book was created in Košice—a place where borders intersect, where the stories of people on the run meet the daily struggles with unaffordable housing. In 2022, the city became one of the main hubs for aid to people arriving from Ukraine. But alongside the wave of solidarity, another reality quickly emerged: hundreds of empty apartments, minimal available resources, and almost no public infrastructure capable of making them equitably accessible.
The anthology Housing in Times of Crisis connects experiences from Slovakia with the European context. It examines how the climate crisis, economic instability, the failure of the housing market, and the consequences of migration translate into concrete everyday situations. Authors from various corners of Europe come together here to reflect, discuss, draw maps, and forge new alliances. They demonstrate that housing is not just about where and how we live—but also about what we consider to be shared, just, and possible.
The publication builds on the ideas and questions raised at the Never Never School 2023 summer school—a space for dialogic learning and interdisciplinary experimentation with urban utopias. The Spolka+ collective has been organizing it since 2018 in Košice for individuals and collectives from the fields of architecture, art, social sciences, and urban design. Each edition brings together diverse perspectives and creates a space for collective responses to the pressing questions of our time.
