Photos : Jennifer Duyne Barenstein

SustHerit Webinar Series - “City, Climate Change, Resilience and Adaptability”

19 March 2026, 5pm (CET), via Zoom / Organized by the SUSTHERIT consortium team, a three-year research project. 

Contact : Eleni Demetriou, post-doctorante, ANR SustHerit, IREMAM, eleni.demetriou [at] univ-amu.fr

Hannah WIDMER - “Densifying and renovating – but at what cost? Environmental and energy policies and housing affordability in Zurich”.

This talk will present insights from ongoing research in the framework of the ReHousIn project («Contextualised pathways to Reduce Housing Inequalities in the Green Transition»). Setting the scene by giving an overview of policies promoting densification and energy refurbishments in Switzerland, we will then focus on their implementation and their interlinkages with market dynamics in Zurich, specifically in AltsteNen. This neighbourhood was officially designated as one of the priority areas for densification and has been undergoing profound transformations in recent years, which have increasingly been accompanied by detrimental consequences for the inhabitants of the renewed buildings.

Hannah WIDMER is a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Wohnforum – ETH CASE in the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. As a sociologist and human geographer, her research focuses on the influence of environmental and energy policies on housing inequalities, regional effects of housing shortages, processes of inclusion and exclusion in public space.