Description

“Humans are more than just individual use-maximizers. Humans are social beings attuned to cooperation.” Elinor Ostrom[1]

Community and the way we live are closely linked. However, it was not until the rise of industrialization dissolved centuries-old organizational forms of living and working that collective living was imbued with a new meaning that requires explanation. This contrasts with conventional individual living, which is carried out either alone or within a family, requires no legitimization, and seems to be a logical con sequence of social development. Unconventional collective living must be justified; questions are posed about intentions, any value added by this type of living, and whether it was chosen freely or due to a lack of alternatives. Culture influences the reasons people share living space just as much as it influences their desire to live conventionally. Compared to conventional living, however, collective living is often a more conscious choice — partly because collective living can usually be understood as a criticism of conventional living. The deliberate decision to live together as a community, and the collective living models that result, can be seen as responses to social change. In the overall history of housing, then, collective living has played a significant role: providing the opportunity for reflection.

As a recurring phenomenon in the history of housing, collective living has been interpreted differently depending on the era and the varying economic, political, and social conditions at the time. This has resulted in fundamentally different living models, floor plans, and shared rooms and facilities. Collective living models over around the last 150 years have been witnesses to their era, varying widely in genesis, organization, occupancy, and operational structure. These models reveal a great deal about how each epoch perceived lifestyles, lived together, operated their households, raised children, and excluded or integrated wage labor into their housing situation. This perspective places great important on the social role played by women in each respective era. After all, the genesis of collective living has often been a desire for a less burdensome or a shared form of household management and parenting. The aim is to better involve women in the paid employment system and to improve the interplay of career and family work. These intentions stand in great contrast to the increasing devaluation of housework and the role of the housewife. Collective housing models thus often include a critique of the prevailing conservative images of living and housing and reveal social processes through spatial expression, making developments in lifestyles and household types visible in a built form.

Living spaces are shared for a variety of reasons that are influenced by economic, political, and social factors. These three aspects can be defined as the motivations behind sharing living space and greatly influence the various types of collective living. However, depending on the point in time and objective of each collective housing model, the factors must be assessed differently and, in some cases, also overlap. This makes a clear demarcation between the three motivations almost impossible. Each housing project has its own specific goals in addition to the economic, political, and social driving factors and is integrated into an existing context and legal framework. Often, the same or similar housing models are founded for very different reasons. Closer inspection can reveal that the three motivations are weighted quite differently, though a specific motivation usually comes to the fore due to the prevailing zeitgeist, circumstances, and problems of the time. The purpose of this publication is to classify the various collective living projects of the last 150 years into nine housing models according to the weighting of their motivations. Three housing models are attributed to each overlying motivation. This makes it possible to identify and clarify the developmental trajectories of collective living and to create connections between the various housing projects, thus sharpening our understanding of collective ways of living. Collective living models since industrialization are most strongly rooted in economic motivations. This was seen for the first time in the housing models of the utopian socialists’ Large Housing Complexes starting in the mid-1820s, in the Men’s and Women’s Hostels and Boarding Houses in the 1900s, and in the Central-Kitchen Houses[2] that originated in 1905. In addition to providing adequate housing until the end of World War II, the primary economic motive for sharing housing was to relieve the pressures of housework — that is, to reduce the dual burden on working women. This was seen in the centralization and rationalization of housework and the sharing of services such as cleaning and laundering. In this developmental phase, not only kitchens were shared, but other basic facilities as well, such as bathrooms, which had not yet become the standard in working-class homes. Access to shared facilities such as a bathhouse or washing room were, in many places, a great improvement in hygienic conditions. In addition, collective housing was used to create affordable housing for user groups who had not yet been able to establish themselves, especially in Men’s and Women’s Hostels.

Socialist and Social Democratic movements in the early 20th century endowed the political motivations behind collective housing with increasing importance, a trend that continued in a variety of ways into the 1970s. The Garden City and Courtyard Apartment Building housing models flourished across Europe in an early phase, thanks to trade union, cooperative, and municipal developers, alleviating the housing shortage for the working-class people pouring into the cities. The goal was their de-proletarianization and general betterment. Closed, self-sufficient living spaces for each family, supplemented by additional shared infrastructure such as meeting rooms or shops, helped achieve this aim. After the peak of World War II, the guiding social principle became stability and security, achieved through broad-based political consensus and ensuring the consolidation of the nuclear family as the primary organizational form of living. The diversity and variety of collective housing models then tapered off sharply. There was a rise of Community Settlements, with only sparse collective living spaces, often initiated without resident participation. It was not until the student movement of 1968 (68er-Bewegung) that the political arena opened up enough for the housing model of Cooperative Living to develop, in search of new forms of collective living.

In the 1970s, communication was mentioned for the first time as a motivation — in other words, a social reason for sharing.[3] A clear desire for community — a social motivation for sharing living space — thus came to the forefront with the last of the three housing models. In the 1980s, Housing and Culture Projects sought out collective living as a means of expressing flexible social relationships, increasing participation, and attaining a sense of community.[4] The Community Households and Cluster Apartments that emerged in the 1980s, but only be – came established in the 2010s, took things a step further. This housing model initially sought to break away from the isolation of families. Today it corresponds to changing households and lifestyles and considers itself to take a sufficiency approach towards managing living space. Co-Living, one of the newest models of collective living, is not only about seeking community, but it also values sharing over ownership and clearly targets Millennials as a user group. Co-Living is often associated with co-working. This housing model demonstrates how this youngest generation of adults can envision entering their own living biography and how working environments could be shaped in the future. Today, desires for belonging, social exchange, and the integration of living and working drive the evolution of collective living in many ways.

No matter what the motivation is, collective living entails both partaking and participating. Partaking can include gaining access to the housing market and an adequate living space, opportunities to unify work and family, and options for participating in, exchanging with, and belonging to a community. Participating means taking action. The simple availability of collective spaces alone does not constitute shared living. Residents must appropriate the spaces, negotiate them, and put them to use. The three different motivations make sharing a fundamental form of human behavior that governs relationships of exchange and interaction,[5] and they are based on values such as solidarity, justice, and mutual benefit, which in turn optimizes personal benefit. The idea of mutual benefit is not new, and it is not something that can be effected alone. Like the forms of collective living carried out in Central Europe long before industrialization, it becomes an indispensable basis for living and working together, and thus for securing one’s livelihood. Cooperatives and what were called corporations, for example, were highly formalized legal entities for regulating the joint management of common lands, protected forests, and other communal goods in the agricultural sector. Through industrialization, the processes of privatization and individualization rearranged the way that resources were shared and managed.

When we talk about sharing today, the term sharing economies often comes up. However, this contemporary model for sharing or collective use of resources has few similarities to the previous system of collectively managing common goods. The focus is more on creating economies through sharing and thus on increasing individual access to certain goods and services without adding significant value to the community. It is a fundamentally different culture of sharing. In the sharing economy, each person is merely a co-user, in contrast to the community-benefit approach of sharing as partaking, in which a member of a cooperative, for example, is always also a partial owner. While the sharing economy is indeed about sharing and using resources together instead of owning them individually, it is none the less more a “renting economy” than anything else.[6] What is common to both approaches, however, is the creation of easier access to goods and services in order to make better use of certain resources.

The motives of independence and self-responsibility are also significant; at first glance they seem to signify individuality, but they also have a great impact on the community. Most of the nine housing models of recent decades aim to encourage the independence of the residents, whether through self-organized operational structures or by facilitating household management. Collective living does not mean conforming to predefined structures, but instead creating or invigorating them through active use. Participation in a collective living model is always driven by a need, which, depending on the motivation can be economically, politically, or socially rooted. This self-motivated approach, based upon an inner need, can hardly be applied from the outside. Thus, behind every collective living project lies the active element of a self-dependent decision to choose this specific form of living and lifestyle.

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Originally published in: Susanne Schmid, Dietmar Eberle, Margrit Hugentobler (eds.), A History of Collective Living. Forms of Shared Housing, Birkhäuser, 2019. Translation by Word Up!, LLC, edited for Building Types Online.