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Rocío Calzado is a Spanish architect and political scientist based in Paris, currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées. Her academic research focuses on maintenance practices in architecture and urbanism, particularly within the field of social housing. She studies the processes of demolition and transformation in housing estates across European cities, aiming to understand how maintenance can support sustainable and equitable urban futures.

Rocío is a co-founding partner of docar, a documentary film collective dedicated to narrating urban and architectural controversies. Her filmmaking practice centers on European social housing, demolition, maintenance, and housing rights. Her films have been presented at institutions such as the Venice Architecture Biennale, MAXXI Museum in Rome, and the Royal Academy of London.

Her professional work as an urbanist explores maintenance at both the building and urban scales. She collaborates with municipalities, social landlords, and urbanists to design architecture and urban maintenance protocols that can foster long-term sustainability and social innovation. Since 2023, she has been involved in a consultancy project with the Ville de Paris and Paris Habitat, developing new housing maintenance strategies for the city.

Rocío holds a Bachelor's and Master's in Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, and a Master's in the Politics of Ecology from Sciences Po Paris. She has worked in international architecture offices such as MVRDV(Rotterdam), MQ Architecture (New York), Tsukamoto Lab (Tokyo), Ezquiaga Arquitectura (Madrid), and l’AUC (Paris).

Her academic work has been presented in forums such as Panel 21 at the United Nations’ World Urban Forum and published in journals including the European Journal of Spatial Development and the European Network for Housing Research. She is also a fellow of the Palladio Foundation and the LINA community, and a local collaborator of HouseEurope!




ABOUT


Au delà de la démolition
Le soin de l’architecture

 R CALZADO
2023, ECOLE DES PONTS PARIS TECH


Paris Habitat and ATER are the two main social landlords in Paris and Rome, with a stock of 125000 housing units in the first one (Paris Habitat 2021) and 48 000 the second one (Puccini, 2016) Both social landlords have been in charge for more than a hundred years of the development and maintenance of a large and varied social housing stock. This stock is typologically varied, including building types that go from low-rise developments to large-scale utopic grands ensembles (Ibid). At a time when the UN has acknowledged a worldwide crisis in affordable housing (U.N. 78th Sess. 2023), the primary hurdle for social landlords is to match the escalating societal demand for housing. Besides creating new social housing, social landlords must also ensure the durability of their housing estates. This thesis explores the factors that influence the actions of social landlords to enlarge or reduce the lifespan of a housing estate. To do so, the thesis examines the interplay between external factors that may influence the decision-making over one housing estate, such as market value, political goals or public opinion, while analysing the technical and spatial characteristics of the place itself, and the control of such characteristics by the social landlord. The central thesis of this study suggests that the physical characteristics of housing estates influence the decision-making process of social landlords regarding whether to increase or reduce the lifespan of a housing estate itself. The study will also test the relation between long-term maintenance activities, the role of guardians, and the increase of technical knowledge on the specificities of each housing estate. This project delves into the practice of housing transformation as well as the practice of housing demolition and how is it avoided. It explores the role of two different social landlords in the transformation of two different housing estates in France and Italy, as a mediator between political goals, technical knowledge and social companionship. Finally, this thesis seeks to contribute to the reduced but fast-growing literature on the maintenance and transformation of housing estates.


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