More and more people are struggling to pay their rent, and cannot get a foot on the housing ladder. The reasons: high rents for privately rented apartments, real estate speculation and cutbacks in social programmes combine to make living in cities a major challenge of our times.

How can these challenges be met? Cohousing and cooperative building offer new solutions to contemporary housing challenges. For years, building collectives and housing projects in many countries have gained experience in cooperative planning, developed new forms of housing, and experimented with unconventional forms of communal housing.

Making use of cooperative planning processes, non-profit oriented management, and collective responsibility in developing and implementing new forms of cohousing - housing initiatives meeting these criteria are the focus of this publication. They represent a reaction to a duplicate crisis of living: on the one hand, they offer solutions to new forms of social relationships requiring new forms of living beyond the classical family apartment of the modern age, on the other hand they break with the logic of real estate market-oriented property utilisation that places profit above living as a fundamental need and inalienable right of humanity.  

This publication traces an arc from the history of communal living via the cooperative movement of the 1980s to current approaches to communal and self-organised living.

This book arose within a TU Wien fellowship on the topic of “New Social Housing”.

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