An Atlas of Commoning: Places of Collective Production

Integrative building project

Mathias Heyden in conversation with Christian Hiller, Anh-Linh Ngo, and Max Kaldenhoff

Since the 1990s, a substantial number of Baugruppen—selfinitiated co-housing projects— have sprung up across Berlin.

This integrative building project on the site of Berlin’s former wholesale flower market strives to achieve both functional and social diversity by relying on internal solidarity rather than external subsidies. The project combines residential and work spaces for creative professionals, while also mixing three different types of ownership that are evenly distributed throughout the complex: flats and ateliers that are part privately, part cooperatively owned, and apartments (operated by a social agency) which provide independent living for people with special needs.

WiLMa19 is one of 128 collective housing projects across Germany that constitute the Mietshäuser Syndikat (Tenement Syndicate). The syndicate provides a model for self-organized living based on a solidarity economy. Its decentralized structure renders the reselling of property nearly impossible and stabilizes rents below market rate, while empowering tenants within autonomous projects to collectively determine how they would like to live. At WiLMa19, tenants live in diverse community constellations beyond the normative nuclear family and in varied configurations of individual or shared spaces.

Based in Rotterdam, Stad in de Maak (City in the Making) is an association that redevelops vacant buildings into affordable housing, as well as work and community spaces that are collectively managed. Seeking opportunities in areas where real estate markets fail, the initiative leases vacant buildings from developers for a duration of three to ten years in exchange for their restoration and maintenance.

Crowdfunded projects are emerging as a new form of citizen-led urban development.

The devastating effects of Airbnb on housing affordability have laid bare the twisted nature of the so-called sharing economy.

Elizabeth Calderon Lüning and Marco Clausen in conversation with Christian Hiller and Anh-Linh Ngo

The Nomadic Green initiative—together with volunteers, neighbors, and activists—has transformed a state-owned brownfield site in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin.

From usucapion to squatting – historic references

Originally planned as a bank headquarters, Torre David is a 45-storey ruin in the heart of Caracas. After a decade of neglect, it became a makeshift home to around 1,300 people, who lived in an extralegal occupation that lasted eight years, until the community was forcefully evicted in 2014.

Appearances, however, can be deceptive. In a city where beginnings and endings (of prosperity or democracy) are interchangeable depending on the person asked, the successive life cycles of this tower represent something bigger and more complex. Construction of the building began in 1989.

In the informal neighborhood of Makoko in Lagos, settlers have built an entire city on the water. This squatter community undermines the very idea of landownership by ramming stilts into the lagoon’s muddy bed and building a new artificial ground from scratch.

Kalkbreite / Dragon Court Village / R-Urban / Granby Workshop

Reproductive labor—which includes the activities that are involved in the upbringing of children, caring of the elderly, preparation of food, and the daily subsistence of the family—is still considered a private issue; a task that to this day falls outside of the economic equation and is largely performed by women in the individual household. For this reason, the issue of the organization of reproductive labor lies at the heart of one of the most obvious, yet still unsolved, social inequalities: that between men and women.

In this video performance, artist Martha Rosler mimics a traditional housewife in the kitchen.

This essay aims to open up some questions around care

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and the production of architecture and space.

The first Swiss consumer cooperatives followed the example of the English cooperative movement that emerged in the early 1820s with Robert Owens’s critical examination of the capitalist mode of production. To counter the unjust distribution of capital and production resources, Owen proposed a cooperative “union of capital, labor, and skill,”1 to be implemented in the form of residential and production communities. Many of the first cooperatives were geared toward the cheap production of food through the communal ownership and cultivation of land. Over time, they found their logical continuation in non-commercial housing cooperatives whose goalsincluded the nonprofitoriented provision of living space. …

Battling soaring rents, the Kalkbreite cooperative offers affordable housing to 230 residents in Zurich’s inner city. Sensitive to the risk of co-housing becoming gated communities, the cooperative strives for an economic, cultural, and ethnic diversity that reflects the demographics of Zurich: in 2015, eight percent of the city’s population depended on social welfare.

Built in the 1960s on the Reeperbahn–a famous street in Hamburg’s St. Pauli quarter–The Esso Houses were a beloved meeting place in the city’s red-light district.

“I write poems to experience what they are about.” – Oleg Jurjew

During the demolition of the Esso Houses, Hamburgbased artist and performer Sylvi Kretzschmar interviewed passersby, former residents, and activists from the Esso Houses Initiative, which fought in vain to preserve the residential complex.

After decades of neglect, residents of Liverpool’s Granby Four Streets have taken the future of the neighborhood into their own hands by refurbishing derelict houses, forming a community land trust (CLT), and taking ownership of the properties.

R-Urban is a network of resident-run facilities aiming at building resilience in cities. The concept refers to French philosopher André Gorz, who calls for producing what we consume, and consuming what we produce.

Japan is not the only place where a single-family detached home in the suburbs is one of the most loved forms of dwelling. With its Dragon Court Village project, the Eureka office has designed an alternative to the modernist separation of functions.

Correlations between social organization and spatial configuration

Malocas are the traditional houses of the Tukano people in the Vaupés region of the Colombian Amazon.

The Amazonian tropical forest cultures, such as the Tukano society in the Vaupés region, in the southeast of Colombia, are independent and dispersed societies. They live in relatively small settlements with egalitarian social orders organized around local chiefs. Their economic, cultural, and spiritual lives are based around the maloca.

Roofless / City Plaza Hotel / Kotti & Co / Auroville

Envisioned as an international community free of government, money, religion, and land ownership, Auroville is an ongoing material and spiritual experiment aspiring to human unity in diversity.

“Auroville is the ideal place for those who want to know the joy and liberation of no longer having any personal possessions” ¹

The relationships between the three monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are of- ten marked by violent discrimination. The visionary House of One in Berlin, however, unites a church, a synagogue, and a mosque under one roof in order to promote interreligious dialogue. A Prot- estant parish, a Jewish community with a rabbini- cal seminary, and a Muslim dialogue initiative jointly initiated the project and its financing through donations and crowdfunding. The build- ing literally stands on the foundations of the Petrikirche (St. Peter’s Church), which was dam- aged during the Second World War and demol- ished in 1964. The main entrance leads into a central, religiously neutral, domed space. From this common space one can then proceed to the three prayer rooms, the archaeological exhibition in the basement, or the loggia in the tower. The House of One stands physically and symbolically for the hope that peaceful coexistence between the three world religions is possible if the negotia- tion process is practiced in everyday life to create commonality. …

Let us imagine planet Earth, with its 203 sovereign states, as a large palace containing 203 rooms. All the rooms have doors with individual locks, and each room shares its keys in a very selective manner with the other rooms.

The conflict over Western Sahara is one of the last post-colonial conflicts in Africa. The former Spanish colony was occupied by Mauritania and Morocco in 1975, which finally annexed the area completely in 1979.

Three generations of Palestine refugees have now lived in the Al Fawwar Camp, in the West Bank. It is a place where any physical traces of settling down are seen as jeopardizing their hopes of returning to the homeland. Their political resist- ance to accepting the status quo, or to embracing ordinary life, suspends Al Fawwar’s residents in a state of permanent temporality where time and space are irreconcilable. Neither past nor future have a place in Al Fawwar. As a result, any act of planning or building is charged with complex contradictions. The “Roofless” project nonetheless engages in the implausible process of co-creating a public square in the camp. This plaza as public living room proposes a common space beyond futile notions of private or public. …

“If we build a plaza in our refugee camp then it should be a closed one.” – Al-Fawwar Refugee Camp inhabitants

Against the odds of an EU-imposed austerity regime, rising xenophobia, and eviction threats, the City Plaza Hotel project in Athens offers a self-determined life-in-common to 400 refugees. Life here is founded on the collective organization of reproductive labor. Residents and volunteers from dozens of countries come together in soli- darity and civil disobedience, to share the daily chores of cleaning, cooking, and childcare—in short, the maintenance and reproduction of everyday life. Without a cent of government funding, the residents put forward a vision of a post-border future beyond degrading refugee camps and detention centers. …

Since 2011, citizens across Spain have been coming together and taking over local city governments in an attempt to rebuild trust in democratic institu- tions and return decision-making to the people. The occupation of public squares, such as El Campo de Cebada in Madrid, and their transfor- mation into laboratories for self-governance and direct democracy, have been catalytic in mobiliz- ing and unifying citizens to claim their right to the city. These so-called “fearless cities”1 have given rise to a global, albeit diverse municipalist move- ment committed to expanding the commons, re-municipalizing basic services, and feminizing politics. But their election into power has also re- vealed the challenges involved in transforming public institutions from within. …

The general stigma that long accompanied housing estates has be- come a thing of the past, most recently since the blatant housing shortage in major German cities and the positive effects of the fed- eral urban development program “Socially Integrative City,” but also due to their aestheticization through photographs displayed in exhibitions and published on social networks.

Fighting for a ordable housing in Berlin’s gecekondu The gecekondu serves as a neighborhood advice center

For over two years, filmmaker Angelika Levi documented the struggle for affordable housing and the preservation of community ties, led by the tenants’ association Kotti & Co at Kottbusser Tor in Berlin.

Devised by ARCH+ together with the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture for the ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) touring exhibition. Exhibition design: Stadelmann Schmutz Wössner Architekten Graphic design: Heimann + Schwante