The conference theme is Sustainable Urban Areas. The conference will highlight the many aspects of housing and urban issues in relation to sustainability. Sustainability is a broad concept that can be addressed from many different angles. Attention to all approaches and their interrelationships is the key to a sustainable society. A common arrangement is to distinguish social, economic, spatial and environmental qualities relating to sustainability. In the conference these will all come to the fore. Plenary sessions with appealing keynote speakers will address current debates in housing like the future role of social housing and the pro's and cons of the demolition of housing estates. In addition to these purely housing related topics, items related to sustainability will also be discussed like transformation processes within the city and at the regional level. Plenary sessions will be organised around two keynote speakers concluding with a debate.

Paper sessions will allow participants to present their research in the urban and housing domain. Most of these sessions will be organised by the regular ENHR working groups, but a number of additional paper tracks will cluster the urban issues not covered by the existing working groups. Additional themes are the sustainable city (innercity development, city transformation), the sustainable environment/region (the metropolitan landscape) and tools to facilitate housing and urban processes (GIS, cadastres, planning games). A description of the additional themes and a list of the regular ENHR working groups are available on link.