Workshop Rimavská Sobota, Slovakia

06–08 October 2023

The whole market seems to have been cornered by "green solutions". We come across them in TV commercials to improve the efficiency of houses, in shops that offer "green" alternatives to common products and elements, but also in specialized companies that prepare projects to transform the functioning of entire buildings to a more sustainable mode, using renewable energy sources. Even though this green, seems to be rolling in on us, year after year, there is still a group of citizens for whom such solutions are very difficult to access, both financially and practically. These are the inhabitants of the so-called marginalised Roma communities. As a part of the UMKA project, together with FAD students, we mapped the accessibility and the state of the issue in selected communities – obchach – in the territory of southern Gemer, in the Rimavská Sobota district, as one of the so-called "NRO" – the least developed districts of Slovakia. In this district, the issue of marginalised Roma communities is closely linked to the issue of poor quality building stock, for which the challenge is energy efficiency and the availability of green, selfsufficient and sustainable technologies. The data and data collected from the field survey will be further used in the next steps of the joint research in coordination with UiS.