The publication serves as a pioneering guide to a new agenda for housing development in general and for housing design competitions in particular. It provides strategic impulses and establishes how these can be embedded in future planning processes. Contemporary housing development continues to reproduce itself through entrenched decision-making patterns that, taken together, result in uniform, monofunctional solutions. This stagnation is particularly evident in the field of architectural competitions, which remain deeply rooted in a fundamentally functionalist understanding of housing. To formulate a meaningful alternative to this entrenched housing typology, it is first necessary to examine its underlying causes and framework conditions. The focus is therefore not primarily on the aesthetic dimensions of architecture, but on broader socio-political questions: from post-war Graz, through the years of the economic boom of the 1960s and early 1970s, to the subsequent periods of structural transformation leading to today’s neoliberal era. The publication was produced in cooperation with the i_w Institute of Housing at Graz University of Technology and the Chamber of Civil Engineers for Styria and Carinthia.