Affordable Housing and Health (2025-)

This area comprised three projects led by Dr. Magda Maaoui:

Beyond healthcare—Hospitals and Housing: Mapping, Quantifying, and Visualizing the Links in an International Perspective. 

This project explores the growing role hospitals have been playing in housing provision, definint housing provision broadly: from the adaptive reuse of abandoned infrastructures of care, to the adoption of innovative construction techniques that house patients and their visitors, to the redefinition of what it means to “live” in hospitals, spanning three different countries.  

The growing role of hospitals in housing provision has only been minimally addressed in the planning literature. In the US, the 2010 Affordable Care Act introduced the topic to policy makers and hospital stakeholders. The Covid-19 pandemic also accelerated the blurring of limits between spaces of living and spaces of care. Across the globe, many initiatives are illustrating how hospitals are taking a stab at both dealing with housing scarcity, and providing typologies of housing that could better heal patients. But to this day, no comprehensive overview has been developed to try and make sense of this growing trend. This project is supported by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design Dean’s Award for junior faculty research. 

Adapting Haussmann: Mapping and Visualizing the Challenges of Mandating Transition in Paris’s Historically Preserved Affordable Housing Stock 

This project addresses the intricate interplay between socio-economic energy poverty and environmental health vulnerability in Paris’s historically preserved Haussmannian affordable housing stock. We assess the impact of the Loi Climat et Résilience (2021) that mandates that, gradually and by 2028, the country’s poorly insulated housing, including the 113,000 Haussmannian “chambres de bonnes” in Paris, must be banned from the rental market, introducing fresh challenges for the City of Paris. While potentially improving living conditions and environmental health outcomes for tenants, the mandate risks diminishing affordable housing availability through a surge in sales, influenced by owners unwilling to bear the insulation costs. The project examined how to enhance health, maintain affordability, and potentially inform European and global climate policy. This project is supported by a grant from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s Center for Green Buildings and Cities. 

Across North and South: An Interactive Overview of 25 Years of the Fair Share Law’s Environmental Health Impacts on Social Housing in France and its Overseas Territories

How has affordable housing siting in France and its overseas territories evolve over the past twenty-five years, following the adoption of significant national housing reforms? How has the geographical distribution of affordable housing intersected with environmental vulnerabilities, including exposure to air pollution, extreme heat, and access to public transportation? This project includes four case studies of France’s varied social housing regimes, in Paris, Brittany, the French riviera, and the overseas territories—this last category having been systematically overlooked in housing studies while it suffers from chronic disinvestment, and repeated climate and health crises, as was shown in recent news of Mayotte’s catastrophic cyclone Chido. By putting them back on the map, this comparative framework provides an unprecedented understanding, across borders, of how local histories, politics, and built environment structures influence the country’s heterogeneous, yet very resilient, patchwork of social housing landscapes. This project is supported by a grant from the Harvard Data Science Initiative, the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and the Joint Center for Housing Studies.