Affordable Housing – Sustainable Urban Regeneration

Sustainable Urban Regeneration: Innovative Frameworks for Affordable Housing

1. Project Context & Transnational Ambition

The City of Kaštela (Croatia), a mid-sized coastal municipality stretching linearly along the Adriatic coast, faces severe socio-economic real estate pressures. Driven by intense seasonal tourism demand and an expanding short-term rental market, local property values and rental rates have completely decoupled from local average incomes. This dynamic disproportionately impacts young families, key workers, and lower-income demographics, creating an acute risk of displacement, social segregation, and a loss of local community identity.

To counteract these vulnerabilities, Kaštela is establishing a real-world "Living Lab" within the DUT Call 2026 framework. Rather than opting for outward urban sprawl, which consumes precious agricultural and greenfield zones, this project explores sustainable urban regeneration. By shifting the paradigm from new construction to systemic urban optimization, the initiative aims to build a transferable framework for affordable, inclusive housing across tourism-pressured European coastal cities.

2. Core Initiative & Project Pillars

The initiative addresses housing affordability through an interconnected, investment-ready pilot strategy built on three distinct operational pillars:

• Systemic Adaptive Reuse: The city will identify, map, and assess underutilized, vacant, or historically significant public and municipal assets. These spaces will be structurally and thermally retrofitted to serve as high-quality, energy-efficient, multi-family affordable residential housing. This strategy actively locks in existing embodied carbon and curtails construction-related waste.

• Alternative Governance & Land Tenure: The project moves away from speculative real estate models by exploring the institutional, legal, and economic feasibility of Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and cooperative housing networks. These frameworks will insulate local housing stock from market volatility and guarantee permanent affordability across generations.

• 15-Minute Mixed-Use Integration: Regenerated housing units will not exist in isolation. The pilot structures will be explicitly integrated into walkable, human-scale neighborhoods. Co-locating affordable units with daily public services, communal spaces, urban greening projects, and micro-mobility connections will foster social equity and low-carbon lifestyles.

3. Direct Alignment with DUT 2026 Topics

As highlighted in the platform selection fields, this project sits perfectly at the intersection of three key DUT transition pathways:

• Cross-cutting Topic 1 (Adaptive reuse of existing urban structures and spaces): This serves as the primary technical mechanism. The project focuses entirely on transforming existing, neglected structural assets into modern social infrastructure.

• 15mC Topic 3 (Nurture neighbourhood economies – activate innovation in local everyday offers): By co-designing residential spaces with integrated local services and alternative community-led tenure models, the project actively revitalizes neighborhood-level social and economic fabrics.

• CUE Topic 3 (Rethinking urban production for circular and resilient cities): Incorporating circular economy principles into building retrofits reduces material consumption, minimizes localized construction waste, and yields lower operational lifecycles for municipal building portfolios.

4. Consortium Collaboration & Expected Outcomes

As a Pilot City and Co-Applicant, Kaštela offers transnational consortium partners a concrete urban context with real asset sites ready for intervention. In collaboration with European research institutions, planners, and civic actors, the project will deliver:

1. A Local Affordable Housing Strategy: A comprehensive, evidence-based policy framework formally endorsed by the city.

2. A Functional Pilot Intervention: At least one concrete site layout and governance framework finalized for an adaptive reuse or cooperative housing development.

3. A Transferable Municipal Toolkit: A scalable regulatory and financial blueprint optimized for coastal and Mediterranean municipalities undergoing tourism-induced housing crises.