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 June 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…
Greece's capital pulled up 14 km of arterial asphalt in 18 months. The temperature data is one story. The acoustic data is another. The third — and least expected — is a 19% drop in summer hospital admissions in …
The Värtaverket plant in northern Stockholm burns wood chips at temperatures hot enough to keep a quarter of a million homes warm through a Swedish winter. It is the largest biomass-fired combined heat and power …