Re-Inhabit Lisbon

„A free renovation for you. A new home for someone else.“

Lisbon contains more than 55,000 vacant dwellings, largely concentrated in privately owned buildings that remain inaccessible to public intervention. Despite substantial EU funding allocated through the Recovery and Resilience Plan to address undignified housing conditions, public programs such as „First Right“ struggle to deliver at scale. The obstacle is not the lack of financial resources, but the absence of legal instruments that allow the State to intervene in long-term private vacancy, where most unused housing stock is located.

This project investigates how vacancy could be activated through a targeted adaptation of the existing legal framework. It proposes a reciprocal mechanism in which publicly funded programs rehabilitate long-term vacant private buildings at no cost to their owners, in exchange for the right to construct one additional floor that remains in public ownership and is designated for social housing. This approach introduces a shared-ownership condominium model, embedding public housing directly within the private urban fabric without land acquisition or expropriation.

Applied to Lisbon, the proposal demonstrates that existing vacant buildings alone can generate tens of thousands of dwellings, enabling the city to meet and exceed national and EU housing targets using already allocated funds. Through a detailed building-scale case study and cost analysis, Re-Inhabit Lisbon shows how vacancy, law and architecture can be aligned to transform the right to housing from a constitutional principle into a built reality.