Vacant City: Experiments in inclusive urban transformation. Netherlands / Hungary

p o l i c y 102 it and everybody is very pleased with the transformation today, the school even invested in the area and the public space around.

What did the transformation policy restructure in the real estate market?

The most important lesson for me was to learn that the real estate is very diffused. The commercial real estate market dealing with the office spaces, and the noncommercial market dealing with social housing and other types of real estate, don’t speak each others’ language, they don’t use the same spreadsheet, they have different ways of working and living. They have their own networks: they don’t meet each other. If you want to transform an office building into housing, you have to go from one market into the other market. It has become easier with time, as they started understanding each other. For transformation, you need people with knowledge of all the different markets. For instance, most of the office buildings that are vacant are larger than 10,000 square meters. While there is a lot of demand for smaller spaces by creative start-ups, the match is very difficult.

Was it easy to get property owners on board?

We compare this sometimes with the briefing process. First you have shock and denial: this was really happening in 2008. Everybody we called said, “There is no problem.” In 2009, when the crisis really came in, they all got very angry, blaming the municipality that we let people build too many offices. They tried to survive but had many bankruptcies. Since 2012, everybody was getting easy again, they started to revalue, started to experiment, taking transformation as a serious option. 5 years ago everybody thought it was impossible to make houses out of offices: complicated financially, in terms of the area and also architecturally. But then some people started calculating and looking at what was possible, how we can make it cheap. It turned out to be quite simple to adapt office buildings into student housing, or short-stay apartments, for instance. And nowadays they even talk about demolition and starting it all over again.