The issue of housing estate regeneration has been intensively addressed in Western European countries since the late 1980s through very complex, lengthy and financially demanding processes. The question is whether it is possible to achieve similar quality of urban environment in countries with smaller budgets, weaker institutional capacities, different ownership structures and higher shares of housing estates from the overall housing stock, i.e. countries of the post-socialist region.

At the same time, findings collected in twenty-five housing estates across the world show that despite differences in culture, climate or available resources, ordinary citizens in economically and institutionally weaker countries (including the post-socialist region) recognize the same shortcomings of housing estates as urban experts in the West and address them through interventions with spatial characteristics similar to those known from large regeneration projects in western countries.

It is argued that understanding bottom-up strategies through which residents are increasing the quality of the environment in housing estates, despite limited funding and minimal to no support from the government, can become the key to more effective housing regeneration processes in post-socialist countries. 

Jitka Molnárová is an architect, a town planner and an urban policy analyst with a focus on housing and urban regeneration in post-socialist and developing countries. As a graduate of Faculty of Architecture of CTU in Prague, she further studied urban governance at Urban School Sciences Po Paris, and at the Faculty of architecture and urbanism PUCP in Lima, where she later worked as a lecturer and researcher. She gained professional experience in France, Peru, Colombia and the Czech Republic. Currently she works on a doctoral thesis about spontaneous transformations of modernist housing estates and designs urban planning and housing estate renewal projects.