Anne Hidalgo, Anna Minton and Anacláudia Rossbach, headline HOWS Barcelona

BARCELONA, Spain , Oct. 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- HOWS Barcelona – Housing World Summit, the new international congress on urban and affordable housing, hosted and promoted by Barcelona City Council and organized by Fira de Barcelona, will bring together governments, cities, real estate developers, third-sector organizations, academia and institutions from 3 to 5 November at the Gran Via venue, alongside Smart City Expo World Congress.

The summit arrives at a time when housing has become one of the defining challenges of our cities with over 300 million people worldwide living with no shelter and 3 billion living in inadequate housing, according to UN-Habitat.

The agency's Executive Director, Anacláudia Rossbach, will be one of the top speakers at HOWS Barcelona. Rossbach has more than twenty years of experience in housing and urban policy, with a particular focus on informal settlements and social housing. She will be joined by Anne Hidalgo, the first woman elected Mayor of Paris and Global Ambassador of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, who champions an agenda that includes affordable and sustainable housing, and by Anna Minton, author of Big Capital: Who Is London For? and Reader in Architecture at the University of East London, whose work focuses on the financialization of land, property and housing. The summit will also feature Carme Arcarazo, spokesperson at the Sindicat de Llogateres, and Jordi Galvez, President of the Federació de Cooperatives d'Habitatge de Catalunya.

The Mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, will host the Housing Mayors' Roundtable where the right to stay and the policies being implemented around the world will be discussed. The mayors of Milan, Giuseppe Sala; Budapest, Gergely Karácsony; Athens, Haris Doukas; and Atlanta, Andre Dickens, will participate, as well as Eamon Ryan, President of the European Commission's Housing Advisory Council. Additionally, the event will host the Housing Mayors' Meeting, a closed-door working session bringing together mayors and senior housing officials from international cities.

Five pillars for a shared challenge
The congress program is structured around five key topics – Urban Planning & Land Policy, Housing Regulation, Social and Affordable Housing, Building Innovation, and Renovation, Retrofit & Reuse. Over three days, sessions will range from land availability and the regulation of a rental market strained by tourism and speculation to cooperative housing models, new financing schemes, industrialized construction and the rehabilitation of existing stock with the goal of finding concrete pathways for more accessible cities.