The EU-CIEMBLY Cyprus National Pilot brought together 60 participants from across Cyprus to explore one of the country’s most pressing challenges: housing.
Held between 22 April and 6 May 2026, the Citizens’ Assembly demonstrated how intersectional deliberation can be applied at national level, creating a space where people with diverse backgrounds and lived experiences could identify priorities, deepen their understanding of the issues and work together towards concrete solutions.
The Assembly took place across three sessions, following EU-CIEMBLY’s deliberative process of Knowing, Understanding and Recommending.
The first session, held online on 22 April, focused on identifying participants’ priorities. A Positionality exercise encouraged participants to reflect on how different social positions and unequal access to resources can shape people’s experiences of housing.
During the second session, held at the University of Cyprus on 25 April, participants engaged with experts and stakeholders to examine the structural causes of housing exclusion. Discussions explored issues including gender, migration status, socio-economic circumstances, student housing, accessibility and social cohesion.
The final session, on 6 May, moved from understanding the problem to developing solutions. Participants worked collectively to finalise 14 policy recommendations addressing housing challenges through an intersectional perspective.
The recommendations covered four broad areas:
- Market regulation, including better use of vacant and underused properties and mechanisms linking housing quality to rental costs;
- Social inclusion, including the integration of social housing into major new developments and greater involvement of persons with disabilities in housing planning;
- Protection and transparency, with stronger action against discrimination and improved multilingual access to housing and welfare information; and
- Innovation, including intergenerational cohabitation schemes that could simultaneously address housing pressures among younger people and make better use of available housing stock.
The Assembly also benefited from engagement with experts, civil society and institutional representatives, helping connect participants’ lived experiences with evidence and the wider policy landscape.
The Cyprus National Pilot represents an important step in EU-CIEMBLY’s wider mission to explore how democratic participation can become more inclusive, representative and responsive to the complexity of people’s lives.
Building on the experience gained in Cyprus, EU-CIEMBLY is now moving towards its next major milestone: the Transnational Citizens’ Assembly, which will bring together 100 participants from six EU Member States to consider how the European Commission’s European Citizens’ Panels could become more inclusive and intersectional.
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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 101132694. This content reflects only the authors’ views. The European Commission is not responsible for its content or for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
