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This text is, above all, an invitation to reflect on contemporary inhabitation: to pause and ask what we truly want to discuss when we design cities. What are we designing? For whom? For what purpose? Where, and with what objective? What values are we promoting today through architecture? These are basic, almost elementary questions. Yet when we fail to ask them honestly, cities become distorted – turning into stages meant to satisfy the desires of a few, rather than shared spaces that are pertinent, responsible, and collectively sustained.
A Desirable Urbanization: Walking, Living Together, Belonging
To imagine an ideal urbanization today does not mean designing a perfect city or formulating a closed model. It means recovering certain fundamental conditions of inhabiting that, although well known, have been progressively displaced by logics of rapid growth, functional specialization, and immediate profitability.
A desirable city is one that can be experienced on foot – not as a romantic gesture, but as a structural condition. Walking allows us to read the territory, recognize scale, form everyday ties, and build a bodily relationship with our surroundings. A walkable city is not only healthier; it is also more democratic, because it reduces dependencies, costs, and barriers to access.
Every day I walk from my home to the studio (in Laguna, Santa Catarina, Brazil). It is exactly 480 steps. The route is always the same, but never identical. As I leave, the neighbors across the street – mother and daughter – offer a warm, indispensable “good morning”. A few meters ahead, turning the corner, a street appears that acts like a corridor almost 200 m long: when the north-east wind blows, that is where it is first felt. Further on comes the commercial street. The shops, their familiar characters, a student I know; smiles spread. Some mornings, the church bells can be heard marking the passage of time. Before reaching the studio, three small clothing stores repeat the same everyday gesture: a brief greeting, shared. This daily path is not merely a functional commute. It is a way of inhabiting the city – of building belonging through minimal ties, shared time, and a human scale that cannot be designed from abstraction. It is in these seemingly simple gestures that architecture and urbanism reveal their true responsibility.
That city is not organized through rigid zoning, but through mix and proximity. Living, studying, working, resting, and meeting do not occur in sealed compartments, but within a complex system where uses overlap and enrich one another. Urban complexity – far from being a problem – is what allows a living ecosystem to form and be capable of adapting to social, economic, and climatic change. Everyday contact with nature is part of that equation: trees that provide shade, wind moving through streets, permeable ground, visible water, vegetation that is not decoration but environmental infrastructure. These elements are not esthetic add-ons; they are essential components of comfort, health, and the perception of urban well-being.
To inhabit a city like this means accepting that comfort cannot be imposed uniformly; it is negotiated with climate, with time, and with bodies. It means designing from the place, rather than from abstract standards. And above all, it means understanding that urban quality is not measured only through economic indicators, but through the capacity to sustain diverse everyday life.
This urban ideal – complex, walkable, mixed, and sensitive to its surroundings – is not a distant utopia. It exists, fragmentarily, in many cities. The problem is not that it is unviable, but that it is constantly subordinated to models that prioritize profitability over inhabitation.
When the Market Stops Producing City: The Global Crisis of Youth Housing
The housing crisis for young people has become one of the most widespread and persistent urban phenomena of our time. In large and small cities, across countries with diverse economies, students and young workers face growing difficulties in accessing housing that is dignified, well located, and economically sustainable. The problem is not limited to price. It also involves spatial quality, contract stability, and the possibility of imagining a life in the medium term. Housing – which should function as a platform for study, work, and the construction of autonomy – becomes a permanent factor of precarity.
This situation is often explained as the result of a lack of supply. Yet data reveals a more complex and contradictory reality. Never has so much been built as in recent decades – and yet never have there been so many vacant or underused square meters. Entire buildings remain empty, held as financial assets while waiting for a future valuation that does not always arrive. Housing thus stops fulfilling its urban and social role and becomes a speculative instrument. The result is doubly problematic: on the one hand, those who need to inhabit the city are pushed out; on the other, the urban fabric itself is weakened. Empty historic centers, mono-functional districts, and increasing spatial segregation are among the visible consequences of this model.
For young people, the impact is especially severe. The inability to access adequate housing delays independence, limits educational and professional opportunities, and deepens inequality. The city, instead of being a space of possibility, becomes a hostile territory. In a recent conversation with students, another scene made this tension painfully clear. Some of them had found work in Laguna after finishing their studies – an important opportunity in an uncertain labor context. And yet they could not accept it. In the summer, they had nowhere to stay. The city that offered them employment did not offer them permanence. Available housing was absorbed by seasonal and touristic logic, turning a concrete possibility into an unavoidable renunciation. It was not a matter of salary, or vocation, or will: it was simply a matter of having nowhere to inhabit.
This situation – repeated and normalized – reveals a profound contradiction. We design cities that demand work, activity, and presence, but we do not always design the conditions necessary for those lives to be sustained over time. This crisis is not only housing-related; it is profoundly urban. When housing is organized exclusively according to market logic, the city stops producing mix, encounter, and diversity. Ultimately, it stops producing city.
The City as Raw Material
Faced with this scenario, rehabilitating existing buildings emerges as a central strategy for rethinking the relationship between housing, city, and resources. Rehabilitation is not only a technical or environmental response; it is a cultural position toward the built territory. Working with what already exists means reducing the carbon footprint associated with construction, taking advantage of available infrastructure, and preserving urban memories that cannot be replaced by new-build. But it also means accepting limits, adapting to pre-existing structures, and designing from constraint – often producing more precise and responsible solutions.
In this context, speaking of an architecture of pertinence becomes fundamental. This is not a label or a style, but a question that precedes any project: what is it pertinent to build today, in this specific place, with the resources available, and in response to the real urgencies of our time?
Pertinence has nothing to do with relevance, nor with spectacle. It has to do with what is appropriate – what belongs. With building from what is there, from what exists, from what can be reused, adapted, or transformed. With recognizing that not everything that is technically possible is socially, environmentally, or culturally pertinent. A pertinent architecture understands context not as a limitation, but as a guide. It accepts limits – material, economic, climatic, urban – as part of the project rather than as obstacles to overcome. In a world marked by climate crisis, resource scarcity, and urban inequality, pertinence ceases to be an ethical option and becomes a basic condition of architectural practice.
To rehabilitate rather than expand, to work with the existing city, and to reuse materials are not nostalgic gestures nor emergency solutions. They are pertinent decisions – concrete responses to a time that can no longer afford the logic of excess or tabula rasa. Transforming obsolete buildings into housing reactivates consolidated areas, especially historic centers and zones well served by urban infrastructure. Unlike peripheral expansion, rehabilitation strengthens the existing city, densifies with meaning, and reduces unnecessary displacement. Using materials from demolition is part of this same logic. Bricks, timber, structural pieces, and building elements carry a material history that can be reincorporated into the productive cycle. Far from nostalgic, the reuse of materials is a concrete form of constructive intelligence, reducing costs, embodied energy, and dependence on extended supply chains.
Rehabilitation is also a way of reprogramming the city. Changing a building’s use modifies flows, schedules, relationships, and social dynamics. When rehabilitation is oriented toward housing – and especially toward youth housing – its urban impact multiplies: more people living, more everyday life, more care for the surroundings. Rather than continuing to expand the city and consume land, rehabilitation offers the possibility of inhabiting what has already been built – not as repetition of the past, but as critical update. In a context of climatic and social crisis, this strategy ceases to be an option and becomes a responsibility.
The ideas of rehabilitating, reusing, and building with pertinence only gain meaning when confronted with a real place – not as an idealized example, but as a territory shaped by tensions, conflicts, and decisions accumulated over time. Laguna, in southern Brazil, is one of those places.
Laguna, a Place
In many heritage cities across Latin America, the emptying of historic centers is often attributed to rigid regulations associated with heritage protection. Yet this explanation is insufficient. In most cases, the problem does not lie in conservation itself, but in deeper economic and speculative processes. The displacement of urban activity toward new areas of expansion follows a well-known logic: for real estate capital, it is more profitable to acquire cheap land on the periphery, promote new developments there, and then create – often with the support of public investment – the conditions necessary for that land to appreciate. This mechanism not only produces urban expansion; it also deliberately weakens existing centers. At the same time, historic centers are trapped in a dynamic of speculative holding. Empty buildings are kept out of use not because of technical or regulatory impossibility, but because their owners expect future valuation without investing, without rehabilitating, and without assuming any responsibility for the urban impact of that waiting. The result is an immobilized city: heritage without life, buildings without inhabitants, centers that stop functioning as collective spaces.
In this context, the question is no longer how to “flexibilize” heritage regulations, but how to reactivate use, how to intervene in the mechanisms of speculation, and how to make inhabiting the city center pertinent once again. Faced with these processes, an architecture of pertinence cannot limit itself to intervening on the building’s form. It must take a position toward land economics, toward the use of capital, and toward the decisions – or indecisions – that determine which parts of the city are inhabited and which are deliberately kept empty.
Student Housing: Housing, Public Program, and City
If the abandonment of the historic center is one visible consequence of the contemporary urban crisis, housing – and particularly housing for young people – can become one of the most effective tools to reverse that process. In Laguna, student housing is not conceived as a punctual solution to a housing deficit, but as an urban strategy capable of reactivating fabric, intensifying everyday life, and restoring bonds between architecture and city. To think student housing in this context means moving away from the model of the closed, self-sufficient residence isolated from its surroundings. Here, housing is not an autonomous object, but one piece within a larger urban system. Its meaning is not exhausted in accommodating students, but in reintroducing permanence, use, and diversity into a historic center that today remains fragmented and underused.
The project proposes working with existing buildings, incorporating housing programs alongside public or semi-public spaces that expand the urban impact of the intervention: workshops, shared areas open to the neighborhood, spaces for collective study, small cultural or social infrastructures. The program is constructed as an additional layer that does not privatize the historic center, but makes it more porous and accessible. This combination of housing and public program allows the building to stop functioning as a boundary and become an urban articulator. The relationship with the street, the continuity of public space, the possibility of passing through, staying, or meeting without mandatory consumption are design decisions that reinforce the idea of the city as a common good. Architecture does not impose itself on its surroundings; it enters into dialogue with them.
Student housing also introduces a temporality different from tourism or speculative real estate. Students inhabit the place for extended periods, establish routines, build ties with local commerce, and use public space at different hours. This everyday repetition is what reactivates the city in a deeper and more lasting way.
Spatially, the project prioritizes intermediate and shared areas: courtyards, generous corridors, informal meeting spaces that do not respond to a rigid program but allow the construction of community. These spaces are not residual; they are the project’s heart. They are where exchanges happen – conversations and forms of learning that are not part of the academic curriculum, but are essential to the formation of an adult and collective life.
Housing quality is not measured only in terms of minimum surface area, but in its relationship to the surroundings: cross ventilation, natural light, visual contact with vegetation, the possibility of walking barefoot on cool surfaces, solar and climatic protection designed from the place. These are seemingly simple decisions, but they have a direct impact on how we inhabit and on our perception of everyday well-being.
By integrating student housing with improvements to urban space, the project assumes that housing cannot be designed in isolation. Each intervention produces effects beyond the property line: more people on the street, more eyes on public space, greater economic and social vitality. Housing thus becomes urban infrastructure – not only a housing response.
This approach also redefines the role of the student within the city. No longer a transient user, the student becomes an active inhabitant, with the right to occupy the historic center, appropriate its spaces, and participate in everyday life. By inhabiting heritage, students stop being spectators of the past and become actors of the present. Understood in this way, student housing is not a social-assistance gesture, nor an exception within the market. It is a wager on an urban model that recognizes housing as a tool of social transformation, capable of repairing the relationship between architecture, city, and community. More than solving a punctual problem, the project tests a larger question: what would happen if we once again thought of housing as a motor of the city, and not as a financial product?
An Equation That Does Not Add Up: Market Logic, Square Meters, and Fair Value
In recent decades, the dominant logic of the real estate market has refined an equation that, while financially sophisticated, is increasingly fragile from an urban and social standpoint. The formula is well known: reduce square meters, maximize profit per unit, accelerate turnover, and treat housing as a financial asset rather than as a place to live. The result is visible in many cities worldwide: homes that are smaller, more expensive, and less livable. This logic affects young people directly. Students and early-career workers are forced to accept conditions that not long ago were considered temporary – or even unacceptable: minimal spaces, poor environmental comfort, unstable contracts, and rents that absorb a disproportionate share of income. Housing stops being support for everyday life and becomes a constant source of anxiety.
Paradoxically, this situation does not stem from a real shortage of built space. On the contrary, never has so much been built as in recent decades. Millions of square meters remain empty or underused, trapped in a speculative logic that waits for the “right moment” to maximize financial value. Meanwhile, cities expand, historic centers empty out, and urban life fragments. The equation, then, does not add up. It does not add up for inhabitants; it does not add up for cities, and in the medium term it does not add up for the market either. An empty building does not produce city. A historic center without residents cannot be sustained. And a generation that cannot access dignified housing will struggle to build stable life projects.
In this scenario, it is urgent to rethink what we mean by “value” in housing. Value cannot be measured solely in terms of financial return. It must include variables the market tends to ignore: spatial quality, durability, climatic comfort, relationship to the urban surroundings, and above all the capacity to sustain everyday life. Respecting a fair rental value does not mean renouncing profitability. It means understanding that there is a threshold beyond which economic gain begins to produce structural harm. When rent expels inhabitants, the city loses diversity, vitality, and future. Extreme price inflation does not generate urban value; it destroys it.
Likewise, the obsession with reducing square meters as a strategy to “make housing affordable” ends up producing the opposite effect. Spaces that are too small force precarious living, accelerate building wear, and push basic functions into public space – or directly onto the street – rather than resolving them under dignified conditions. Extreme reduction is not efficiency; it is the impoverishment of inhabitation.
To propose another equation is to accept that housing must offer reasonable surface areas, good ventilation, natural light, and shared spaces that extend domestic life. It is to recognize that comfort is not a luxury, but a minimum condition for physical and mental health – and that permanence, the possibility of staying, matters as much as the initial price of rent. In this sense, student and youth housing can function as a testing ground for a broader model. By working with balanced rental values and carefully considered spatial quality, these projects show it is possible to reconcile economic viability with urban responsibility. This is not about opposing the market, but about redefining its parameters.
The equation that dominates contemporary real estate development is not a natural law; it is a cultural and political construction. And like any construction, it can – and must – be revised. Bringing fair value back to the center of the discussion is not an ideological gesture; it is a necessary condition for housing to fulfill its most basic function again. Because when housing ceases to be habitable, the city ceases to be city.
Who Invests? Capital, Risk, and Urban Responsibility
Whenever a housing model prioritizes use, fair value, and
long-term permanence, a recurring question arises: who invests in these projects? The answer is often loaded with prejudice. It is assumed that only philanthropy or public subsidy can sustain initiatives with social responsibility, and that the market, by definition, operates in the opposite direction. Yet this opposition oversimplifies a far more complex landscape.
Rehabilitation projects and housing with urban impact are not sustained by charity. They are businesses – but businesses of another kind. They do not respond to the logic of immediate profit or short-term speculation, but to investment models that understand the city as a living system and the building as an asset that must remain habitable, used, and cared for over time. The capital that participates in this kind of projects often seeks stability rather than extreme maximization: long-term investment, moderate but steady returns, lower turnover, and less exposure to speculative risk. Instead of betting on vacancy as a strategy – waiting for land value to rise without use – these models bet on continuous occupation, active maintenance, and integration with the urban surroundings.
Investing in housing with urban responsibility does not mean giving up profitability. It means understanding that value is produced not only on a financial spreadsheet, but also through the durability of the building, the reduction of costs associated with abandonment, income stability, and resilience in the face of economic crises. An inhabited building is a building that is preserved. A stable community is a guarantee of continuity. This kind of investment also recognizes that architecture and urbanism directly influence a project’s economic performance. Spatial quality, environmental comfort, relationship to public space, and the pertinence of the program are not secondary variables: they affect residents’ permanence, the care of the property, and the sustainability of the model over the long term. Designing well is not an added expense; it is an economic strategy.
In the case of student and youth housing, this logic becomes especially clear. It serves a population with steady demand, predictable cycles, and a strong relationship to territory. By offering dignified conditions, balanced rents, and an experience of inhabiting connected to the city, these projects reduce turnover, strengthen rootedness, and generate a healthier relationship between investment and use. It is important to note that this model does not replace the role of the State, nor does it deny the need for public housing policies. On the contrary, it is strengthened when there is a clear regulatory framework, incentives for rehabilitation, and a shared urban vision. Private investment with urban responsibility does not operate in a vacuum: it needs rules, agreements, and a common understanding that the city is a collective good.
Calling these projects “alternative” is, in a way, inaccurate. What is truly exceptional is the speculative model that dominates much contemporary urban development and produces empty buildings, degraded historic centers, and increasingly exclusionary cities. Against that backdrop, investing in habitable, integrated, socially responsible housing is not an anomaly; it is a necessary correction.
The challenge is not attracting capital at any cost, but aligning investment, architecture, and city. When that happens, housing stops being a mere financial instrument and becomes an active piece of the urban fabric – an asset that generates not only economic return, but also social, cultural, and environmental value. Investing, in this sense, is also a way of taking a position on the kind of city we want to sustain over time.
A Collective Commitment
To inhabit is not to occupy an available space. To inhabit is to sustain a relationship over time – with a place, with other people, with climate, with materials, with the history that precedes us, and with the future we are shaping without realizing it. Cities that function only as platforms for financial investment tend to be emptied of life. Their buildings may be in perfect condition, but they lack what truly preserves them: everyday use, care, permanence. Against that model, thinking of housing as social infrastructure is not an ideological posture, but an urban necessity.
Laguna shows, at a legible scale, that another relationship between city and housing is possible – not because it offers universal solutions, but because it makes once more visible questions that many metropolises have stopped asking: who can live in the city center? Under what conditions? For how long? With what degree of participation in urban life?
Rehabilitating existing buildings, working with demolition materials, offering housing with fair rental values and dignified floor area, integrating public program and urban space, and attracting long-term committed investment are not isolated gestures. They are part of a single position: understanding that the city is not built only with buildings, but with bonds.
Student housing, in this context, stops being a specific typology and becomes a broader test of how we want to inhabit the world. Young people who live in the historic center, who walk the city, use its squares, engage with local commerce, and take part in everyday life do not merely occupy square meters: they produce city.
To inhabit well is not a privilege. It is the base on which more just communities, more stable economies, and more resilient cities are built. And that base is not achieved through abstract formulas, but through concrete decisions: what we rehabilitate, what we demolish, for whom we build, at what price, and with what time horizon. Relearning how to inhabit the city also means relearning how to build with pertinence: doing only what truly corresponds, in the place where it corresponds, and at the moment when it corresponds.
Perhaps the most urgent challenge of our time is not to invent new cities, but to learn to inhabit better the ones that already exist: to listen to their scales, respect their rhythms, accept their limits, and recognize that each project – however small it may seem – is also a position taken on the world we want to sustain.
To inhabit, in the end, is a profoundly political act. And also, inevitably, an act of hope.
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