U-BUILD Community: Participatory Housing Models for Affordable Urban Living

Housing affordability in Europe and the Western Balkans has become a systemic failure, with rising prices, speculative markets, and inadequate public provision collectively excluding young and middle-income households from adequate housing. This lecture presents the U-BUILD Community model as a transformative participatory alternative: a framework in which young people are not passive recipients of housing policy but active contributors to design, financing, and community investment. Drawing on implementation experience in the Western Balkans, it demonstrates how participatory housing models can simultaneously lower construction costs, build community ownership, and produce housing that is more durable, better suited to local conditions, and more deeply embedded in local contexts. The lecture argues that genuinely affordable housing requires giving the next generation not just shelter, but a stake in the city itself.