© Agostiño Iglesias

When in a famous essay Friedrich Engels denounced the living conditions of workers in Victorian England, the construction of dwellings became one of the principal themes of socialism, and eventually it found its way into the list of fundamental rights to be honored in any democracy deserving to be called that. Without having to go very far, consider the fact that access to housing figures as essential in the Spanish Constitution. Improving conditions and opportunities for the working classes was among the top objectives of early architectural modernity, although it was only in the 1950s and 1960s that architects had to address the housing problem with a combination of ingenuity and scarce resources. In Spain, the urgent matter of building homes took on the negative connotations of ‘developmentalism,’ a breeding ground of corruption plots which in the 1990s and the early 2000s swelled the real-estate bubble to such an extent that it simply had to burst. In theory the crisis is now over, but housing remains a big headache. Gentrification just keeps growing and so does the economic instability of young people. This of course has a bearing on political agendas, but it rarely goes beyond populist promises. It is currently a most pressing matter to engage in real discussions and debates surrounding the theme of housing: that basic, ordinary, necessary space which, unfortunately, has for too many citizens become a utopia.