Mediation as an alternative. Housing policy and housing-emergency regulation in Barcelona

The efforts of the City of Barcelona to face the housing-emergency context seem conditioned by three elements structuring housing policy: a) the difficulty to translate social and economic attributes of housing into political terms, b) the privilege granted by national policies to real estate and financial agents, motivating the instability of tenants, and c) the insufficient public housing stock that coexists with a citizen's demand that goes further from municipal capacity of management. Emphasizing housing on a rental basis, our work aims to understand and explain how does the Barcelona City Council regulates housing policy and what possibilities exist for the deployment of alternative urban policies.