CALL 2026
Vienna International Summer School on New Social Housing
14–18 September 2026

HOUSING AND DATA JUSTICE

In Vienna in the 1920s, Otto Neurath developed the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics as part of a broader political and pedagogical project: to make complex social and economic data intelligible to broad publics. At the time, researchers were already examining the interplay between societal conditions and everyday precarity of housing, as well as the interrelation of social, architectural and hygienic aspects, in order to actively advocate for the improvement of housing conditions through empirical studies. The invention of new economic models (such as housing cooperatives) and architectural approaches relied centrally on the systematic assessment of workers’ housing needs. For Neurath housing conditions, living standards and patterns of inequality were not technical matters for experts alone, but collective facts that required public understanding in order to enable democratic decision-making. Data, in this tradition, was inseparable from questions of accessibility, education and social justice.

This historical lineage resonates with pressing concerns about data justice today: Almost a century later, housing is deeply entangled with data, but under fundamentally different conditions. Today, the production, processing and interpretation of housing-related data are increasingly shaped by digital infrastructures, algorithmic systems and artificial intelligence. Data no longer circulates primarily as a means of public knowledge, but as an operational resource controlled by the availability of data technology embedded in automated decision-making, platform economies and predictive governance. Housing policy, social housing allocation, planning instruments, market regulation, and everyday housing practices are progressively determined by data-driven systems.

This shift raises profound challenges and risks. Access to affordable housing and the distribution of living space are increasingly influenced by algorithmic classifications, predictive models and digital scoring systems – with data being a currency in its own to maximise profits or efficiently implement austerity measures. Social housing, historically a central instrument of social redistribution, relies on data to identify needs and allocate resources, yet digitalisation transforms data from an administrative tool into a powerful mechanism of inclusion or exclusion. These dynamics are particularly pronounced in the uneven geographies of global capitalism, where significant gaps persist between overboarding data for formal housing systems and lacking or invisible data on informal housing markets — revealing how data availability itself is shaped by power relations. At the same time, biased datasets, automated eligibility assessments and platform-based market tools risk reinforcing existing inequalities, producing new forms of digital redlining and displacing political judgement with technical rationalities. As AI systems anticipate, recommend or even determine housing-related decisions, questions arise about transparency, accountability, and participation.

Against this background, the Vienna International Summer School on New Social Housing invites early-career researchers, practitioners, and critical thinkers from the social sciences, architecture, art, planning, social design, legal studies and other related disciplines to engage with housing as a field shaped by data and digitalisation. Building on Vienna’s history, the Summer School seeks to critically examine contemporary data-driven housing systems, explore their risks and implications for everyday life and reflect on how housing knowledge, governance and practice might be reimagined in ways that are transparent, democratic and socially just.

Key topics for the Summer School include:

1. Data Justice, Housing Politics and Uneven Geographies:

Housing governance is increasingly shaped by data practices that shape shape access to housing, tenure security, rent control enforcement, eviction risk assessments and spatial inequalities. Critical analyses are invited on how algorithmic governance, digital redlining, and open data regimes reproduce or intensify exclusion along socio-economic, racialised, and territorial lines. Central questions concern data rights and power: what housing-related data is accessible to tenants, residents, and communities; who is rendered visible or invisible within data-driven systems; and who collects, owns, and governs housing data under specific legal and institutional arrangements. Particular attention is given to uneven data landscapes between formal and informal housing markets across a North-South divide, and the peripheries of capitalism, where data scarcity, opacity, or enclosure function as forms of structural power.

2. AI, Machine Learning and the Governance of Housing Systems: 

Artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems increasingly mediate housing markets, policy-making, and administrative decision-making. Contributions are invited that examine the use of AI in market analysis, affordability metrics, planning simulations, tenant selection, allocation procedures, and access to social housing, and that critically assess how these technologies reshape governance, accountability, and regulation. Key concerns include how algorithmic systems encode assumptions about risk, efficiency, and eligibility, and how markers of inequality (such as race, ethnicity, migration status, or income) are incorporated, obscured, or amplified within automated processes. The role of digital tools used by landlords, investors, and platform-based actors in restructuring housing markets, reinforcing spatial inequalities, or enabling extractive practices is of particular interest.

3. Architecture, Modelling, and Data-Driven Design:

Architectural design and planning are increasingly conducted through data-intensive modelling practices that bind spatial form to regulatory, financial, and policy frameworks. Through techniques such as Building Information Modeling (BIM), parametric design, and AI-assisted simulations, architectural knowledge becomes embedded in housing governance across design, construction, and management. Critical reflections are encouraged on how encoded standards (including minimum dwelling sizes, accessibility requirements, energy norms, and cost parameters) translate policy objectives into normed spatial forms. Of interest are the effects of data-driven modelling on architectural agency, creativity, and typological diversity, particularly in social housing contexts, and the forms of knowledge, normativity, and power produced when architectural models function as infrastructures of governance.

4. Visualising Housing, Measuring and Housing Practice as Common Knowledge:

Housing knowledge is produced not only through measurement and analysis, but through practices of representation, interpretation, and communication. Drawing on Vienna’s tradition of socially engaged research and the legacy of Otto Neurath’s Isotype, this topic addresses how housing-related data is visualised, mapped, and narrated to become accessible, contestable, emancipatory or politically operative. Questions of epistemic legitimacy are central: what counts as knowledge about housing conditions, needs, and futures, and whose experiences are rendered visible or marginalised within dominant data regimes? Interdisciplinary and reflexive research methods (including emancipatory approaches, community-based observatories, artistic and design-led research, and critical cartography) are foregrounded as means to interrogate power relations embedded in housing data and research practices and to explore how data-driven representations can enable democratic debate and self-organised, collective action or, alternatively, reinforce abstraction and exclusion.

In response to these key topics, we encourage applicants to explore commonalities and differences between communities and regions in the Global North and South, highlighting diverse perspectives on how knowledge about housing is produced, transformed, circulated and stabilised. In a week of exchange and collaboration, we look for responses to the key topics mentioned and invite contributions from all academic disciplines. The summer school is open for early-stage academics (predoc, postdoc) from all disciplinary contexts as well as for housing activists and representatives of housing and urban policy initiatives who want to contribute to the above-mentioned topics. During the summer school, we will discuss research findings of empirical or design-based contributions. Building on these, we will work conceptually by example of housing institutions and urban areas in Vienna. Participants (maximum 15) are selected by the Curatorial Team of the Summer School.

The Vienna International Summer School on New Social Housing builds on the experience of the IBA_ResearchLab Summer Schools (2018–2022). Established in 2022, the Research Center for New Social Housing continues the international and interdisciplinary exchange initiated during the IBA Vienna, advancing transdisciplinary housing research and fostering exchange across academia, policy, and practice. As a joint initiative between TU Wien, the University of Vienna, and the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Summer School is organized by the Research Center for New Social Housing and supported by a broad network of institutional and public partners.

PROGRAMME

The programme of the International Summer School includes the following formats:

• CLASSROOM SESSIONS: The research projects of the participants will be presented and put up for discussion among peers and members of an international Faculty. The aim is to reflect, refine and deepen one’s own work and research approach with peers and internationally renowned scholars from different disciplines and universities.
• WORKSHOPS: Various methodological approaches to housing research, such as housing biographies, housing statistics and socio-spatial analysis to participatory methods at the interface between research, architecture, art and community work will be examined in more detail along with the prospects of mixed designs.
• FIELD TRIPS: On-site field trips and walks with stakeholders, local actors and practitioners offer insights into the manifestation of the summer school’s topic in Vienna.
• LECTURES: Public lectures and a panel discussion by and with members of the international faculty on current questions of housing research