Municipal and Community Housing Observatories: monitoring mechanisms for democratic governance and urban justice

The intensification of housing unaffordability, tenure insecurity and socio-spatial inequalities in Athens has highlighted the need for robust monitoring tools capable of informing evidence-based and socially responsive housing policy. In this context, the Municipality of Athens has included the establishment of a Municipal Housing Observatory within its recent Housing Policy Strategy, envisioning a permanent mechanism for documenting housing conditions, supporting policy design and evaluation, and improving public access to housing-related information. This paper sets out a preliminary framework for the design of a Metropolitan Housing Observatory in Athens, examining the opportunities and constraints involved in its institutional and methodological development. It maps the current landscape of available housing data in Greece and the Athens metropolitan area, including administrative registries, census and survey data, taxation records, social policy databases, real-estate market platforms and geospatial sources. Particular attention is given to fragmentation, uneven accessibility, lack of interoperability, and the absence of systematic local-scale indicators. The presentation also discusses lack of evidence and institutional tools that hinder effective housing policy making, such as the lack of an official rent and housing price index, updated information on use, housing quality, energy upgrade needs and vacancy, as well as displacement pressure or deprivation, tools that would be also necessary for identifying areas under housing stress, as currently discussed at a European level. Finally, the paper reflects on possible governance models for the Observatory, emphasising collaboration between municipal services, universities, research centres, civil society organisations and national statistical authorities. By articulating dispersed datasets and expertise, a Metropolitan Housing Observatory could become both a technical infrastructure for policy coordination and a democratic instrument for transparency, accountability and housing justice in Athens. Keywords: housing observatories; Athens; housing data; affordability; housing justice

This contribution addresses the political conditions under which a housing observatory can become an instrument of democratic counter-knowledge, going beyond a monitoring mechanism oriented toward institutional decision-making. Lately, the discourse around data accessibility has gained a pivotal position both for institutional actors and for grassroots movements dealing with housing inequalities. In contexts of housing precarity and conflict, access to data is never neutral: what gets measured, by whom, and for whom directly conditions the possibility of articulating housing rights as collective claims. The presentation will reflect on the importance of intersecting multiple sources and actors, as a way to both orient policies toward more community-sensitive approaches and to empower communities by building awareness of the quantitative dimensions of the exclusionary dynamics affecting the right to the city. The context is the municipality of Naples, Southern Italy, where the lack of a coherent and comprehensive dataset constrains the capacity of institutional and civil society actors to measure and analyse the dynamics shaping housing access. To develop a critical and up-to-date analysis of the housing issue in Naples, the new Open Lab (NaHO), led by the University Federico II of Naples, will process data and analysis on housing dynamics. The NaHO's project aims to collect data on housing conditions in terms of both affected social groups and housing stock quality - integrating background data, often outdated or insufficient, with an analysis of emerging issues and needs. The research outputs will contribute to propose an interactive tool for data elaboration and representation, usable by researchers, institutional actors, and grassroots organisations alike. The contribution addresses both the methodological challenges of building such an instrument and its political ambition: the observatory as a tool for rendering legible - and therefore contestable - the mechanisms through which financialisation produces housing exclusion.

Paralleled by a progressive crisis and lack of investments in the public housing sector, civic organisations in Italy are reclaiming housing as common good with a proliferation of strategies, including reframing data about housing as a terrain of political struggle rather than neutral administrative evidence. While housing is increasingly governed through market metrics, asset valorisation, and platform economies, forms of knowledge attentive to social conditions and rights of inhabitation have progressively faded from official systems of recording data. Analysing local experiences directly or indirectly linked to the national activists network Social Forum dell’Abitare (including civic observatories, counter-mapping practices, and campaigns on vacancy and displacement) the article explains how these grassroots initiatives contest the epistemological frameworks through which urban space becomes governable. It argues that these experiences challenge the technocratic depoliticisation of housing itself, by exposing the inability of institutional housing indicators to capture the issues related housing and reveal lived effects of touristification, financialisation in cities. Further attention is devoted to the role of academic institutions increasingly involved in collaborative forms of research with civic observatories as much as with local administrations, questioning whether these collaborations have the potential to generate transformative forms of co-knowledge or risk fragmenting, or reabsorbing grassroots critique into managerial instrument of policy neutralisation. In conclusion, paper argues that the significance of bottom-up local housing observatories lies less in their capacity to improve governance efficiency than in their ability to challenging prevailing assumptions about how urban crises should be recorded, measured, and governed.

Amid intensifying housing pressures and the persistent underuse of urban building stock, vacant and inadequately used properties represent an important yet insufficiently documented resource for cooperative and social housing strategies. This paper presents the action-research methodology developed by CoHab Athens, an open group working for the promotion of cooperative housing in Greece, which focuses on detecting, mapping and reclaiming vacant buildings through collective forms of knowledge production that combine civic engagement with spatial documentation. Through its “Reclaim” campaign, CoHab tries to mobilise neighbourhood groups, housing activists and residents to identify and record vacant properties using participatory field mapping, direct observation and citizen data collection. The initiative seeks to make vacancy visible not only as a spatial condition but also as a political issue linked to housing exclusion, underinvestment and unequal access to urban resources. The collected information is visualised through a web-mapping tool (currently based on Google Maps), with plans to migrate to an open-source platform that will support community deliberation and collective claims for the socially beneficial reuse of vacant properties, particularly those under public or charitable ownership. The methodology also includes co-design workshops and collective mapping walks that function simultaneously as data-gathering practices and civic engagement events, fostering local collaboration and awareness around housing under-use. The paper argues that such bottom-up activist practices can function as alternative housing observatories rooted in community participation and action research, that can complement or even challenge official databases, towards a more socially just (re)activation of urban vacancy. Keywords: participatory mapping; vacant buildings; cooperative housing; action research

The Exarcheia Mapping Group (Ομάδα Χαρτογράφησης Εξαρχείων) was formed in 2023 to document ongoing socio-spatial transformations in the neighborhood. As a participatory, community-based collective, we engage in counter-mapping as part of broader community responses to touristification and gentrification. Through fieldwork and methods including mapping, GIS, photography, interviews, and sound recordings, we reconstruct these processes from the bottom up, drawing on local knowledge and lived experience. Exarcheia, a historic mixed-use neighborhood of Athens with a strong social and political tradition, has undergone rapid change in recent years. It is significantly affected by the housing crisis, as uncontrolled touristification and real estate speculation displace residents and everyday activities, while weakening social ties. From this perspective, we argue that the housing crisis in Athens extends beyond limited access to affordable housing. Rather, it is a broader and complex crisis of habitation, affecting not only individuals, but also their communities and their ability to exercise their rights ‘within’ and ‘to’ the city. The presentation combines two complementary approaches. First, mapping is used to examine how global dynamics take shape locally, interacting with specific places and processes and shaping everyday urban life. Particular attention is given to vacant buildings and the conversion of residential and mixed-use buildings into tourist accommodation. Second, visual methods, including photography and video, are used to document these changes and explore how they are experienced in space.

This contribution reflects on the merits of collaborating with neighbourhood social workers, regionally subsidised organisations, and tenant unions to collect data on residential displacement and housing injustices. It revisits an action research study conducted with Bonnevie, a local housing aid organisation in Old Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, a working-class neighbourhood in Brussels. Using the case files of Bonnevie’s social workers as a situated data source, the research emphasises how such institutional structures can compensate for the lack of systematic data and provide an essential entry point for conceptualising evictions and forced displacement. Taking eviction classifications and causes as an entry point, the study argues for the development of displacement-based eviction monitoring through diversified data collection methods, enabling a critical assessment of institutional interference in the production of precarity. Engaging with studies and calls to action that denounce the lack of a functioning system for monitoring evictions in Belgium, this contribution intervenes in an ongoing debate on the absence of consistent data on evictions, both nationally and in the Brussels Region. In particular, it refers to a regional eviction monitoring system proposed in a 2023 ordinance to the Brussels Housing Code. Conceptualisations of eviction play an important discursive role, requiring robust data, yet such data production remains embedded in material and institutional realities. This contribution highlights how eviction monitoring is tied to (1) the socio-spatial structures of neighbourhoods and (2) legal frameworks shaped by legislative systems and institutional bodies responsible for regulation, enforcement, prevention, and data collection. It further shows how collecting data through social workers’ frontline positions enables displacement-based monitoring, offering critical insight into the production of precarity and (3) revealing the impacts of displacement pressures from their vantage point.