Welcome to the Bristol Housing Festival

Changing the narrative on housing

A festival to inspire, create and celebrate progress in housing.

Based on the idea that Festivals – such as the Great Exhibition, 1851, and the Festival of Britain, 1951, celebrated and showcased innovation and led to cultural change and discovery.

ABOUT THE BRISTOL HOUSING FESTIVAL

Through Bristol Housing Festival, we have created a powerful context to help cities engage with systemic innovation in Bristol. It falls under our umbrella organisation, Housing Festival, which was set up to inspire, create and celebrate progress in housing.

We work across public, political and industry groups and offer a mechanism to ‘find a way through,’ to de-risk and create the right conditions to ‘go first.’ We focus on unique and organic local politics of place to facilitate the delivery of housing solutions that catalyse rapid innovation. This mechanism involves creating prototypes to be tested and if successful, offer replicable, scalable solutions.

We have a number of ongoing projects to meet this ambition, which you can learn about on our Projects page. This has included work with Bristol City Council supporting Project 1000 (the council’s ambition to build 1000 affordable homes a year by 2024), and working with UN-Habitat and other global partners on a local demonstrator project to trial innovative approaches to viability for affordable homes on small, brownfield sites.

As we learn from these projects we publish our research and learning to make it as easy as possible to share between organisations and cities. You can access this for free on our resources page.

Our priority is not units of housing, but innovation in construction and collaborative partnerships to find solutions for the wider challenges that cities face. We help reframe the question that underpins developing housing strategy to look at how the outcomes and value from housing are contributing to the improvement of the physical and mental health of the population and the sustainability of our planet.

Together, it’s time to re-imagine better ways to live in our cities.

Become part of the conversation by following us on social media and subscribing to our newsletter. (Links at the bottom of the page).

To find out more you can watch our 2 minute video about the Bristol Housing Festival, or you may also want to meet our team and read about our umbrella organisation, Housing Festival.