Housing as a Public Good: Spatial Justice, Democratic Resilience, and the Right to the City

The global housing crisis is most commonly diagnosed as a supply problem, a design problem, or a financing problem -but this lecture argues that all three diagnoses miss a more fundamental failure: a failure of governance. Drawing on research from the Centre for the Just City at TU Delft, it makes the case that housing systems can only produce genuinely resilient cities when housing is governed as a public good embedded in democratic institutions, guided by spatial justice principles, and insulated from the purely extractive logics of financialized markets. The lecture examines case studies from the Netherlands and beyond to trace the conditions under which this is possible, and the political forces that routinely undermine it. Its central claim is stark: without justice in housing, urban resilience is an illusion -a performance of stability that conceals deepening vulnerability beneath the surface.