The Barcelona City Council, through its Municipal Housing and Rehabilitation Institute, has published the winning bids of the tender for constructing new buildings under a use assignment system. Three cooperatives will construct new collective housing developments on municipal plots in the districts of Sants-Montjuïc, Sant Andreu and Nou Barris.
The winning cooperatives were La Mangala (Sotrac), for the construction of a development of 45 official protection homes at Carrer de la Constitució nº 43; Cohabitem Sant Andreu, for the construction of a development of 30 official protection homes at Carrer sense nom nº 10-12 of Les Casernes de Sant Andreu; and Cohousing Barcelona, SCCL, for the construction of a development of 27 official protection homes at Carrer Aiguablava nº 74-76 in Trinitat Nova.
All three cooperatives entered the public tender, and on the basis of the cooperative social projects they submitted they were selected for a second phase which took into account the relationship of the architectural project with the space and criteria such as the acoustic comfort and energy efficiency of the proposals. The three projects will signify the construction of 102 new cooperative homes.
Barcelona, the first city in the Country with collective housing projects in motion
This is the second public tender of plots initiated by the Barcelona City Council. The first tender procedure was announced in November 2016, receiving 16 projects for 7 plots offered. Finally, four were awarded to construct a total of 89 homes in a collective housing system in the districts of Ciutat Vella, Sants-Montjuïc, Nou Barris and Sant Martí. At present, three of these four works are in progress.
The second tender, then, reinforces one of the priorities of the Council’s actions included in the 2016-2025 Housing Right Plan, focussed on enlarging the public housing stock in the city of Barcelona, offering new opportunities to cooperatives and social housing developers. At the present date, a total of 10 plots have been placed at the disposal of the cooperative movement to construct approximately 250 homes there. To these projects we also have to add two others that are already in progress: two buildings with 5 and 28 homes in a cooperation system in which neighbours are already living, at Carrer Princesa 49 in Ciutat Vella and Carrer Constitució 85 in the Sants-Montjuïc district.
The next step will be to start working on an agreement to regulate the supply to the social housing developers of municipal land for rental housing and assignment of the use right (collective housing). This would facilitate a faster and less cumbersome system of awarding than tender proceedings. In this respect, the City Council’s intention is to promote the model of collective housing, and to this purpose it aims to place at the disposal of social operators the development of 600 homes addressed to mitigating the housing emergency, a part of which would be allocated to the assignment of the use right.