Building on History: Report from Secondment

What can we learn about housing by looking beyond once own situated problems and solutions? The journey of Natalia and Achim (Projekthaus Potsdam) to Portugal opened new perspectives on how history and present shape solutions go beyond buildings, they grow from connection, shared spaces, and how we live together.

Achim Wamssler

Building on History: Portugal’s Past as Source for Its Problems and for New Perspectives on Housing

If one thinks about housing, the first things that usually come into mind are the many challenges involved for Europe’s societies and the no fewer problems faced by the majority of people in Europe: rising costs of building new living space and subsequently rising rents and costs of living in general, urbanisation and rural exodus, ghettoisation, the climate crisis’ effects on cities and their populations, shortages in the labour force, exploitation of workers, and increasing isolation of residents due to aging population and change of lifestyle – the list could be continued effortlessly. Due to the pressing nature of these issues, we often ignore the historical side of the status quo, or see it only as an interesting though rather insignificant part of the story.

But what if we could learn more from history than just how something became what it is today? What kind of problems, working or failed solutions, new perspectives – what kind of inspiration – can we draw out of history? With this question, Natalia and I (Achim) started our journey to Portugal in December 2026. Our attempt was to get to know another society’s approach to the most pressing contemporary problems around the topic of housing and to gain another, maybe better (?), perspective on our own challenges in Berlin, Potsdam, and Germany.

Our travel started quite some time before December 2026 with our attempt to get from Berlin to Porto by train. We tried hard: hours of researching the world wide web, checking out different routes and means of transportation, planning accommodation (commercial and with friends) along the way, and evaluating costs, advantages, and disadvantages. All this, only to finally realise that not only were the available options much more expensive than a flight, but also that the journey would have taken a minimum of three very stressful days, arriving late in the evening in Paris, Barcelona, and Vigo and leaving very early the next day. Sure, there was the alternative of combining the travel with one day in Paris and Barcelona. But besides the increasing costs, we would have also spent five days each way only to get to Porto and back home. In the end, we arrived at the conclusion that, in order to slow travel in Europe, one has to take great pleasure in journeys of Homeric proportions – something we did not feel like doing with a five-year-old in tow.

For the time of our secondment, we chose Porto as a base and were lucky to find accommodation in the apartment of a project partner’s associate. And even though the main goal of the secondment was to connect with project partners, living like a local (and not like a tourist) gave us a first-perspective experience of some aspects of the topic we were there for. In Germany, for example, tiled floors without carpets are usually found only in bathrooms and kitchens. In Portugal, they seem to be standard due to their cooling effects in the summer – a fact that turned out as a slight disadvantage in Porto’s December. And apartments or entire houses without some sort of centralised heating system? In Germany, unthinkable. In a country like Portugal, where in 9 out of 12 months the average monthly temperature is 17 degrees or higher, anything more than a local instant water heater would be a cruel waste of money. (Just to give folks an idea: in our housing project in Potsdam, we recently had to replace our 20-year-old central 100 kW heating system and paid around €100,000!).

These and other insights were a great start for reaching out to our project partners, who could back up our impressions with details about Portuguese environmental and historical specificities.

We first met with José António Ferreira and Sara Neves from Domus Social, Porto’s publicly owned social housing company. While giving us a tour through some of the neighbourhoods in Porto that they manage, they offered not only interesting insights into the social structure and the historical situatedness of these neighbourhoods, but also into the aims of publicly funded social housing from the 1960s up to now in Porto and Portugal.

To understand the many specific advantages, problems, and particularities of these spaces and communities, insight into the historical context is inevitable. For example: the apparent contradiction of the huge number of empty and run-down buildings one finds at every corner of Porto, even though rents are skyrocketing. It is intriguing to understand that this is (at least partly) due to a law from the Salazar era in the 1960s that froze rents, which made it very unattractive for many owners to invest in renewing buildings. And even though the legislation changed quite a while ago, house owners are still holding back on renovations, now because it is often more lucrative to use these buildings for speculation rather than to create more living space.

Also, the – for our eyes at first glance astonishing – fact that the average rent for an apartment rented out by Domus Social is only €70 loses its magic when put into perspective with minimum wages and the high cost of living in Portugal. Bearing this in mind, it points more to the precarious situation of lower-income population in Portugal rather than to a luxurious way of life for these inhabitants.

We also gave a presentation at Domus Social about our project (Projekthaus Potsdam) and how, over the last 30 years, many housing projects under the umbrella organisation “Miethäuser Syndikat” developed a standalone system to create self-managed property withdrawn from the speculative market and with moderate rents.

One key aspect that sparked interest in the discussion following our presentation, but also during our meetings with the project partner Gaiurb in Vila Nova de Gaia and the Department of Urban and Spatial Planning of Braga Municipality, was the question of if and how we are able to create a group identity shared by all members – an identity that is somehow necessary to taking care of the real estate. It turned out that many social housing companies struggle at this point. We explained that it is also, for our project, a continuous effort to bring people together, solve tensions, and create a stronger bond than between usual residents. What helps here – and this is the opinion of many in the housing project community – is a common space. One, where group members not only can meet at previously agreed appointments but were they have to go, or at least usually go. Such a place is often a common kitchen or a washing place, as we saw during the tour José and Sara gave us through Porto: at one of the oldest buildings Domus Social manages, we saw in the backyard the remnants of a washing area with several stone sinks where residents had to wash their clothes side by side back in the 60s and 70s. A place that, beyond its apparent function, was back then also a space to connect, exchange news, and discuss personal problems, and political issues. Nowadays, with washing machines in every household, the necessity to wash outside is long gone – and with it the social space that brought people together.

For us, the journey to Portugal made us aware of that housing is never just a technical or economic issue, but always deeply shaped by history, culture, and everyday practices. What at first seemed unfamiliar or even contradictory can become more understandable when seen also through a historical and anthropological lens. At the same time, the exchange with our project partners made clear that, despite different contexts, many of the challenges are shared across Europe. If there is one lasting insight from this secondment, it is that meaningful solutions require not only new policies, but also a renewed attention to social connections and collective spaces – because housing, ultimately, is not just about buildings, but about the ways we live together.

Deliver sAfe and Social Housing (DASH) ist ein vierjähriges Projekt, das vom Forschungs- und Innovationsprogramm Horizon der Europäischen Union im Rahmen der Marie-Skłodowska-Curie-Maßnahmen - Personalaustausch - gefördert wird.

Project DASH is funded by the European Union.