Housing and the People closed with the story of the largest housing cooperative in the world: Co-Op City in New York. In this hour, we screened Adam Tanaka's City in a City, a short documentary film exploring the housing development built in New York between 1966 and 1973 and which is home to over 40,000 people. After the film, we embarked on a live tour and conversation with a current resident to think about what this visionary project can teach us about housing for the future.

Hosted by Open House New York

Jump back to the 1930s in hour eleven, with homes in Brno and New York that both tell stories over generations. First, a visit to the Tenement Museum in New York, where the 'Baldizzi Apartment' recreates the 1930s home of a family of Italian immigrants living through the Great Depression. A divergence from the Functionalist style of architecture of the period, and more luxurious than the Baldizzi apartment but equally functionalist, Tesař Villa in Brno was designed by Bohuslav Fuchs in 1937 with large apartments set behind curving walls. The building was commissioned by the Tesař family and has remained in the family for three generations.

Hosted by Open House Brno and New York

Hour ten brought us to the realm of the experimental and the progressive, with projects that propose new ways of building and rebuilding communities. On the outskirts of Valencia, Espai Verd by Antonio Cortés Ferrando is an eruption of concrete forms and overflowing vegetation; a forest suspended above the ground with over 100 apartments. When completed in the mid-1990s, Espai Verd was an experiment in bringing urban dwellers closer to nature and each other. In Morelos, southern Mexico, we find a distributed approach to community structures with the Casas Jojutla project. Following a devastating earthquake in 2017, ARO Aqrquitectura worked with the federal institute for worker's housing to develop a housing prototype to provide quality homes that were replicable yet sensitive to their specific resident needs. Sixty homes have subsequently been built.

Hosted by Open House Valencia and Proyector

As our family structures, living arrangements, and domestic requirements change, housing models are also being designed to adapt. In hour nine, we visited two new housing projects on the Mediterranean coast with adaptability at their core. APROP Ciutat Vella in Barcelona is a new building of eight apartments delicately constructed from converted shipping containers – meaning the whole structure can be transported when necessary. The spacious and stylish apartments are intended for neighbourhood residents who require emergency housing as a result of evictions due to gentrification. Further up the Mediterranean coast in Montpellier, architect Farshid Moussavi sees flexibility as a luxury at La Folie Divine. In this nine-storey tower, residents can sub-divide their apartments to suit their domestic needs.

Hosted by Open House Barcelona and London

We discover a curious connection between Lagos and southern Portugal through architectural heritage in hour eight. The Water House in Lagos Island is one of the city's few remaining Brazilian-style buildings, a 19th-century architectural movement spearheaded by Afro-Brazilians returning to Lagos and other parts of West Africa following the abolition of slavery. The Water House's colonial architecture echoes the Rose Building in Vila Real de Santo António, a city in southern Portugal. This grand 18th-century house, recently converted with the Mustard Building into five apartments by Lisbon-based architects Aurora Arquitectos, exhibits some of the same neoclassical flourishes as the Water House, hinting at the global flow of architectural ideas through and beyond the Portuguese empire.

Hosted by Open House Lagos and Open House Lisbon

All homes should be places of care and comfort, although housing for the elderly or those best suited for changing situations can often be isolating or challenging to manage. In hour seven, we saw two housing projects for supported living, allowing older people and people with dementia to thrive and enjoy where they live. The first is the AVA Housing in Dublin, a proposal to retrofit the homes of older adults, allowing them to downsize within their own homes and address the city's housing shortage at the same time. On a larger scale, the Carpe Diem Dementia Village in Oslo is a stylish and sensitively designed complex consisting of 136 communal housing units and 22 high care dementia units to provide a compassionate community for those suffering from the disease. Both models offer new ways of living and ageing well.

Hosted by Open House Dublin and Oslo

In hour six, we visited two communities of artists whose homes reflect their creative practice. Künstleratelier Erlenmatt Ost is an affordable residential studio building in Basel and home to a group of artists and their families. The cooperative of artists worked with Degelo Architekten to construct empty shell units, completed in 2019, allowing residents to design their own interior arrangements to meet their domestic and creative needs. Meanwhile, Trolltun Borettslag has been operating as an artist community in Oslo since 1959. Dozens of prominent Norwegian visual artists have lived in the timber-clad home studios whose original construction was supported by the Oslo municipality. What can the new creative community in Basel learn from the veterans in Oslo?

Hosted by Open House Basel and Oslo

Two modern classics from London brought us into hour five. First, we visited the primary coloured facades of the Golden Lane Estate, completed in 1962, whose Great Arthur House was once the tallest residential building in London. Next, we headed to the neighbouring Barbican Estate, one of the architectural icons of the city with its rough concrete, labyrinthine raised walkways and communal facilities. Both projects were designed by architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon and remain as some of the finest housing in London.

Hosted by Open House London

Inspiring housing projects can exist at the scale of the room, the apartment, the block, the street, even the city. In hour four, we visited two projects at the neighbourhood scale, providing new homes, streets and community spaces for thousands of people. In London, the Colville Estate master plan by Karakusevic Carson Architects has doubled the number of homes on a canal-side site. It now features over 900 homes plus a community centre and gallery space in sleek brick blocks. With new homes for 40,000 people, Lakeside Aspern in Vienna is one of the largest urban development areas in Europe. We will look at phase 3 - Quartier am Seebogen, which combines ambitious housing concepts with a mix of additional functions enabling communities to engage and form their own livable quartier.

Hosted by Karakusevic Carson Architects and Open House Vienna

The third hour of the festival brought together mid-20th century visions of the future from Prague, Czech Republic and Colombo, Sri Lanka. First, the Ďáblice estate in north Prague, designed and built over twenty years from the 1960s to 1980s, housed nearly 30,000 residents and provided exceptional public artworks and communal facilities such as schools, kindergartens, playgrounds, clubrooms and even an open swimming area. Next, we headed to Colombo and the Senanayake Flats by the visionary architect Minnette de Silva. De Silva was once the most famous woman architect in the world, and the Senanayake Flats exemplify her particular blend of high modernism and contextually sensitive design details.

Hosted by Open House Prague

Explore the complex web of economic, political and cultural forces in Victoria as they impact access to affordable, safe and secure housing for women and women-led households. Mel Bright, director of Studio Bright, presented the practice’s recently completed Older Women’s Housing Project, a pilot project led by Women’s Property Initiatives (WPI), and Sophie Dyring, director of Schored Projects, presented her practice’s approach to design and advocacy in the social housing space, expanding on Schored’s work with WPI through the social housing projects Coburg Townhouses and Pakenham Family Housing.

Hosted by Open House Melbourne

We kicked off the 12-hour festival with two new housing models from Taiwan. As the first social housing project begins construction in the city of Hsinchu, we heard from Liu Shih-Wei, a director of the National Housing and Urban Regeneration Center. Meanwhile, at Pure Co-Living, 9floor is an experiment in coliving located in a former military dormitory close to the centre of Taipei. Complete with communal kitchens and rooftop parties, the project is designed to create a friendlier, more livable city for its residents. Pan Shiyin-Rung, brand and development director at 9floor showed us around.

Hosted by Open House Hsinchu and Taipei