Presentation of the Barcelona Chair for Housing Studies at the UB

On May 17, the UB held the presentation of the Barcelona Chair for Housing Studies, launched by the Barcelona City Council, the Catalan Government, the Spanish Government, the Technical University of Catalonia and Pompeu Fabra University.

The event, presided over by the rector of the UB, Joan Guàrdia, included the participation of the university lecturers Montserrat Pareja-Eastaway and Juli Ponce, co-directors of the chair on behalf of the UB; Javier Burón, Housing manager at the Barcelona City Council, and Jaume Fornt, director of the Housing Agency of Catalonia at the Catalan Government.

The new chair aims to gather the academic talent from both the city and the country regarding different disciplines, such as law, economics, architecture, and so on. The main objective is research and knowledge transfer in the field of public housing and restoration policies.  The two UB co-directors stress that this “is the first interuniversity chair in Catalonia about housing”, and they also mention the comprehensive approach of this topic. Moreover, they say that although the chair will be mainly dedicated to research, it will also provide training programmes and will contribute “to solving real problems through knowledge transfer”. Last, they note that the activities of this chair “will be linked to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and the UN 2030 Agenda, since the universal access to a decent, stable and sustainable house is one of the most urgent and complex challenges the public and private sectors face”.

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