Space for everyone? The housing revolution

City dwellers around the world are suffering from rising housing prices. Whether in London, Paris or Berlin, entire neighbourhoods in major cities are becoming ‘investor ghettos’ where flats are used as speculative investments and are rarely or never occupied. Skyscrapers and prestigious projects are springing up everywhere.

The construction industry has achieved terrible things over the last 20 years: terrible for nature due to its consumption of resources, terrible for city centres, with faceless blocks of glass, steel and luxury apartments everywhere. The construction industry is to blame for the desolate city centres – not the shift to online shopping.

‘The housing crisis is one of Europe's most pressing problems,’ says Maria Mazzucato, an economist from London. She sits in an office in London. Large cities are growing. Barcelona, Paris, London – the population here has grown by over 15% in the last 10 years.
‘Land in cities is simply sold to the highest bidder. But land, our soil, must not be an object of speculation. It is the earth on which we live. Somewhere along the line, our system has suffered a serious blow. Somewhere along the line, we took a wrong turn.’

This film takes viewers to the hotspots of the housing crisis in Europe's major cities. To places where things are heating up – and not just figuratively speaking. Where entire families find themselves on the street from one day to the next, where residential areas are demolished to make way for new developments, but also to places where ways out of the crisis are becoming apparent. At the same time, it explains how things got to this point. How it came to be that such a precious commodity as land in the city centres of Germany and Europe became an object of speculation – and who is responsible for this.