Advertisement
Housing.Yu is happy to announce our first international conference organized within the project. The conference brings together scholars working on housing history, architecture, urban planning, social policy, everyday life, as well as the circulation of knowledge and expertise after the Second World War.Across seven thematic sessions and two keynote lectures, we will discuss questions ranging from housing policy and social rights to mass housing, construction systems, individual housing, urban transformation, resident agency, visual culture, and transnational models. In other words, the conference is packed with discussion, exchange, and new perspectives on one of the most relevant social questions of the twentieth century and the present day.
🎤 Keynote lectures by
Miles Glendinning (University of Edinburgh)
Marija Drėmaitė (Vilnius University)
📍 Pučko otvoreno učilište, Ulica grada Vukovara 68
📅 22–24 October 2026
Whether you are interested in the history of housing, its present-day challenges, or the ways ideas about housing have travelled and changed, we warmly invite you to join us in Zagreb for three days of discussion, exchange, and new perspectives.
The full programme is coming soon, stay tuned!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Call for papers
In recent years, housing has re-emerged as one of the most pressing social and political issues, driven by rising real estate prices, declining affordability, shrinking dwelling sizes, and the deterioration of residential environments. As new models of affordable and public housing are once again being debated, the conference Right to Housing: Projects, Policies, and Knowledge Exchange after the Second World War revisits housing experiences from 1945 to 1991, when providing decent housing and improving everyday life were key goals across both Eastern and Western contexts. By approaching housing as a key site where political projects, expert knowledge, and everyday life intersect, the conference contributes both to historical scholarship and to current discussions on affordable housing.
Right to Housing is the first of two conferences organized within the ERC project Housing.Yu – Right to Housing: The Production of Spaces of Everyday Life in Yugoslavia (1945–1991). The project examines the distinctive experiments of self-managed socialist Yugoslavia in housing policy, finance, tenure, urban planning, and residential construction.
With the aim of positioning Yugoslavia within the broader context of post-war mass housing, the conference explores the development of housing policies, architecture, and housing estates, citizens’ participation, and the circulation of knowledge and expertise, in order to understand how housing in its various forms was conceived, planned, designed, constructed, accessed, allocated, inhabited, managed, and experienced by different social groups.
Particular attention is given to the role of housing stakeholders—the state, producers (architects, planners, construction companies, and professional associations), as well as citizens as residents and users—and to their interactions as they shape the availability and accessibility of housing, housing rights, everyday practices of dwelling, and forms of residential self-management within buildings and through housing cooperatives. The conference also examines how housing stakeholders drew on pre-war legacies and foreign models through transnational exchanges of knowledge, with a primary focus on European contexts.
Proposals addressing other global contexts are also welcome, particularly where they contribute to a broader understanding of post-war housing and knowledge transfer.
A distinct research strand of both the project and the conference is Knowledge in Danger, which addresses the preservation, processing, systematization, digitisation, storage, and public presentation of architectural and urban planning documentation related to mass housing in the postwar period. Contributions from scholars, archivists, curators, and heritage professionals working on endangered housing-related collections are particularly encouraged.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Advertisement
Event venue
Ulica grada Vukovara 68, 10000, Ulica grada Vukovara 68, HR-10000 Zagreb, Hrvatska, Zagreb, Croatia
Tickets
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.
Discover more events by tag
Conferences in ZagrebHistory in ZagrebArchitecture in ZagrebConstruction in ZagrebReal-estate in ZagrebEducation in ZagrebBusiness in Zagreb