Inside Lisbon’s answer to the housing knot
Affordable, dense, and climate-aware: a generation of architects in Lisbon is taking on the contradiction at the heart of European housing, and the city is, gingerly, helping them.

Housing, public space, culture — the daily texture of urban life.
// 4 stories · last updated July 2026
Affordable, dense, and climate-aware: a generation of architects in Lisbon is taking on the contradiction at the heart of European housing, and the city is, gingerly, helping them.
Walk into the lobby of a residential block in Wood City Jätkäsaari and the first thing you notice, before the lift, before the postboxes, is the smell. It is the smell of a Finnish forest in the third week o…
At the eastern edge of the National Garden, on a stretch of Vasilissis Olgas that used to carry four lanes of traffic past the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the asphalt is gone and the cars with it. What is there instead, …
On the morning of 16 April 2020, the last coal boiler in the city stopped burning. The unit was called KVV6 — combined heat and power block six — and it had stood on the Hjorthagen waterfront in the Värtahamnen d…