From hippie haven to climate frontline: Christiania's fight for housing justice

In Copenhagen's Christiania, residents are leading hands-on efforts to make homes warmer, greener, and fairer while in Europe communities on the margins confront energy poverty and housing inequality. Together, these grassroots solutions are testing new pathways toward a more just and sustainable urban future.

Forget about your 18-year-old nights out in Christiania, that place where, twenty years ago, almost anything went. Today, the famous Copenhagen quarter has turned into a hotbed of innovation and a testing ground for practices aimed at tackling housing and energy poverty. Some inhabitants design the interventions, others carry out DIY renovations; some convene assemblies, others propose solutions. The goal? To renovate dilapidated housing, introduce renewable energy, and foster circular economies. Partially funded by the municipality, this initiative is just getting started and is set to continue until 2030.

Christiania is committed: in the colourful neighbourhood, they will integrate solar panels, heat storage, and geothermal energy, along with the will to move out of poorly insulated homes without getting into debt for their energy bills. Considering the residents' average age is high and that around 200 children also live in the old houses, the community feels a strong responsibility to act.

From Sweden Guy Baeten, Professor of Urban Studies at Malmö University and Director of the Institute for Urban Research, and his team, are closely observing the socio‑political dynamics that are unfolding in Christiania. 'So, what is innovative is that they organise it themselves. They have their own energy plan (...) They also have external energy consultants, private companies, who have invited themselves because they think it's such an interesting experiment,' says Baeten. 'The rest of Copenhagen has a very universal centralised energy provision. So Christiania is testing if an alternative to a centralised energy provision is actually possible and also might lead to more equitable results', he underlines.

One thing is clear: energy prices in Christiania are unlikely to skyrocket after the renovation because residents themselves decide which actions to take and would never agree to increased costs. This level of democratic cost control may be hard to replicate elsewhere, but if a community of former hippies in the heart of Copenhagen can buck the European trend moderating their energy bills, it would be a breakthrough.

Christiania is just one of the 15 so called "Prototypes of change" in the framework of the Horizon Europe project PREFIGURE. They aim to understand how innovations can disrupt housing disparities and energy poverty, identify effective housing policies, and mobilise knowledge for sustainable transitions. As European citizens are called upon to upgrade the energy efficiency of their homes, concerns are growing about the social repercussions of these necessary, positive actions especially as they risk inflating rents and housing costs in an already unequal and often unaffordable real estate market.

According to Eurostat, about 4.9 % of Europeans aged 16+ have faced housing difficulties living without their own place at some point. This figure rises to 8.5 % among those at risk of poverty or social exclusion. The highest rates are in Denmark (18.4 %), Finland (17.5 %), and France (17.1 %). Additionally, 10.6 % of urban EU households spend over 40 % of their income on housing, and more than 41 million Europeans could not keep their homes adequately warm in 2022. Energy poverty is especially widespread in Bulgaria, Lithuania, Cyprus, Greece, and Portugal.

Is the situation irreversible? According to Georgia Alexandri, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS), working on PREFIGURE, we will not solve these problems without strong political will: 'We are walking towards a condition where cities and housing turn into an asset for financial investments and housing is not anymore considered as a right for everyday life (...) The energy crisis comes on top of this housing crisis where lots of households, including middle-classes, are not able to pay energy bills since they have to pay all these unaffordable rents. Housing is the most important infrastructure that exists in cities; it is about the well‑being of citizens. If you want to have healthy citizens who are productive and support your economy, you have to secure their homes'.

Without state intervention, starting with support for energy efficiency upgrades, the result will be greater inequality and energy poverty, particularly among vulnerable communities.

The situation in Bulgaria is especially emblematic. According to Eurostat, in 2024, 19 % of households were unable to keep their homes adequately warm. The real estate sector boomed even as the population declined; many private persons own homes, and there is a vast inventory of abandoned properties. Additionally, the energy market for households and small businesses is not liberalised, and around 35 % of the population still heats with wood, a costly and inefficient method, yet state-subsidised: around 350,000 vulnerable Bulgarians receive incentives for wood and coal annually.

At Sofia's Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD), which, under PREFIGURE, translates research into best-practice recommendations, the call is once again for political change: 'We need to be more proactive, more ambitious, and we shouldn't fear that we're going to lose the electoral vote with unpopular measures, which is always the issue,' says Kalina Tcolova, Analyst at CSD Energy and Climate Program.

This urgent need for bold policy action is echoed in the real-world challenges faced just a few countries away, where the human cost of inaction is starkly visible. One of the Greek prototypes of PREFIGURE is studying for the first time energy poverty among refugees. In refugee camps in Thessaloniki, containers intended for a five-year lifespan still house, after 10 years, some 7-8 people in 27 square metres. The containers are hot in summer and cold in the winter, poorly insulated and often dilapidated. 'We start from the assumption that this setup is a completely dystopian scenario that should not even exist; moreover no one has ever studied the energy efficiency of these places,' explains Charalampos Tsavdaroglou, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Amsterdam. 'All the legislation that concerns the refugee accommodation centres all over Europe, doesn't include anything about energy upgrade. The EU, we suggest, should fill this gap', he adds. In the meantime, to make these settlements more humane, environmentally friendly, and affordable for the State, refugees from Iran and Afghanistan, who bring with them ancestral knowledge of home insulation, could apply those traditional techniques. In addition, wind energy could be harnessed in these remote locations, solar panels installed on the container roofs, and greenery introduced to soften the harsh, barren environment. Each Thessaloniki camp, home to between 600 and 1,600 people, currently lacks even basic green spaces', Tsavdaroglou says.

If a refugee camp can become just a bit more liveable and sustainable, there is hope that a change can sweep across Europe. As Anne Kantel, Coordinator of PREFIGURE's sister project HouseInc and Senior Researcher and Project Manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research, in Karlsruhe, emphasizes that addressing housing inequalities and energy poverty in Europe requires a deep understanding of the complex, intertwined structural and individual factors involved. 'Dealing with energy efficiency and the green transition in housing cannot be separated from broader issues of social justice and structural inequality—Kantel says—We don't have all the answers yet. But the fact that these projects are happening, that there is growing insight and motivation, and that policies are starting to address both structural and individual factors, these are all reasons to be hopeful for the future.'

Contacts:

Project coordinator:

Michael Janoschka, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, michael.janoschka@kit.edu

Communication Manager:

Costanza Danovi, Fondazione ICONS, costanza.danovi@icons.it

Project website: https://prefigure.eu/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/prefigure-eu-project/

Twitter: https://x.com/PrefigureEU

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