Below you will find a list of model project examples of collaborative housing from European cities.

Cashes Green, Gloucestershire Land for People
Stroud - UK
The beautiful former hospital site of 2.45 hectares will be redeveloped with 78 new homes, plus a variety of outdoor spaces, allotments, kitchen gardens, paths, wildlife areas, play space, meeting space and a garden building.


There will be freehold homes, CLT part equity homes and social rentals homes, the largest UK CLT scheme so far.

For full details, see
www.haboakus.co.uk/cashes
www.gloucestershirelandforpeople.org
Comunità Villapizzone

Milan - Italy

sharing, sobriety, hospitality, solidarity. 

This community of families is located in Milan in a beautiful rural court building.  In the end of the 1960s Volpi family was searching for a new way of living, working and raising their five children. They get together with a community of Jesuits and create a new way of living based on working, mutual help and solidarity. In the end of the 1970s they move to villapizzone and had the building from the owner in exchange of renovating it. Today there are about 6 families, a Jesuits family and an association dealing with psychiatric patients living there. The building was given to the municipality of Milan and it is now the municipality who let the community have the space. They share a common garden and playground, which are also open to the neighbourhood. There are also a big kitchen and living room for meetings that are also rented for private parties. The families have complete apartments of their own and conduct a regular family life. All the households put all their earnings in a common account and take what they need from it every month. In 1988 the association comunità in famiglia is born from this community to allow and facilitate the creation of new similar communities in italy. Today there about 12 similar communities in italy. 

Färdknäppen Cohousing Development

Stockholm - Sweden

Färdknäppen is the first example of the cohousing model ‘second half of life’, i.e. + 40 without children at home (not housing for elderly). The purpose is to promote a sense of community and mutual support among residents (although all can get normal care from the social authorities when needed). Färdknäppen was built by the municipal housing company Familjebostäder at the initiative of a group of people who wanted to explore a new way of living together. The building is situated in the inner city area of Södermalm (on top of a former railway station) 10 minutes by subway from the City centre. The project consists of a multi-family housing block of 6 floors comprising 2 staircases and 43 apartments of 1, 2 or 3-room units from 37 to 75 sqm. Common spaces are: restaurant kitchen, dining room, library, all-purpose room, roof terrass with a relax room and a fire-place, exercise room, sauna, weaving and sewing room, guest rooms computer room and a garden. Five dinners are served a week, prepared by cooking teams composed of the residents. Being a member of the cohousing association and a cooking team is compulsory for residents. Many work groups exist in the building.

K9

Berlin - Germany

K9 is a consensus-oriented, politically left housing project, with an open living concept and a high proportion of public space for community work, political education and networking.

The buildings date back to 1890. Having survived the war, they were protected from demolition in the following decades, but not renovated. Following the opening of the Berlin Wall the buildings were squatted, and after some wild years of parties, demonstrations and fights it was finally possible for the residents to gain the ownership of their buildings. The Wohnungsbaugenossenschaft Selbstbau e.G., a housing cooperative, was given the ownership and the residents signed a long-term lease agreement with this cooperative.


L'Espoir

Brussels - Belgium

L'Espoir is a project in which 14 low-income families, living in poor housing conditions, became owner of a sustainable, passive house. From the start of the project, they were closely involved in the realization of it. Community center Bonnevie took the initiative in 2004, after they realized that, due to the housing crisis, it was no longer possible to find decent and affordable housing for large families. Bonnevie established a partnership with the Fonds du Logement, CIRE and 14 families in housing need. From the start, great importance was attached to the participation of these families in the realization of the project. This innovative approach led to a number of groundbreaking solutions.

For example, l’Espoir will be the first social passive building in Belgium. Also in other areas, sustainable options were chosen. During the whole process, from specification to delivery, the partners sought for innovative solutions. Different elements of this the project, which was completed in June 2010, grew into an example for others. The building was elected a model building by the Ministry of Environment, and could finally count on a lot of attention from various politicians, social organizations and builders, in Brussels and beyond.

 

Speranza / Plan Grand Froid
Paris - France
The Speranza! projects are a collection of idealistic proposals in which architecture is used responsibly to create affordable structures for those in need. The overarching premise is broad, but the common idea is to act specifically with small scale projects that collectively make a significant impact for people.
 
Goals for the Speranza design for homeless accomodations include creating living spaces that will not only provide a place to rest, but offer visual, audio and light privacy, as well as provide secure storage for personal items. This will also offer collective spaces for eating and socializing. Because the building’s rooms are used during the day, the structures also need to be easily collapsible to make space for daytime uses of the meeting and exhibition room. Speranza is planned in cooperation with the Mayor’s office.
Tre Portar Cohousing Development
Stockholm - Sweden
Tre Portar was built by the municipal housing company Stockholmshem in the suburb of Skarpnäck 25 minutes by subway from the City of Stockholm. The project consists of a multi-family housing block of 5 floors comprising 3 staircases and 50 apartments from 2 to 4 rooms. Common spaces are: a restaurant kitchen, dining room, playroom for children, ceramics workshop, exercise room, wood workshop, sauna, guest room and a garden. The residents consist of 1/3 families with children, 1/4 families with teenagers, 1/4 without kids (incl. 5 pensioners). Most are low & middle income people.
Treasure Hill Co-living Village

Taipei - Taiwan

Treasure Hill Co-living Village (or Treasure Hill Artivists Co-op) is originally a squatter settlement located at the southwest edge of the Taipei city, a piece of public land characterized by its intimate physical relations with a small hill as its backdrop and the adjacent river. It was prohibited from development by the Japanese colonial government as a water-resource protection area and guarded as a military ward after WW II, but its convenient and half-hidden location attracted multiple generations of squatters to engage in self-built activities. At the peak of its evolution, the Treasure-Hill Settlement was the second homeland of about 200 families and individuals - many of them were senile citizens, single veterans, social underclass, students, aborigines, and ‘new immigrants’ from cross-national marriage. Under its informal and pre-modern appearance, it reminisces the city's organic past and manifests the social network of the community's spatial structure. The aesthetic value of its chaotic surface, though debatable, is a clear reflection of the community's daily-life pattern. The residents' ingenious uses of public and semi-public spaces - makeshift arcade, waterfront farmland, terrace gardens, corner-store plaza with movable chairs, to name a few - exhibit collective local wisdom. This mundane hillside community could have continued to lead an ordinary village life if it was not zoned as an urban park according to the city's renewed urban plan of 1980. In 1993, the official announcement of demolishing the squatter was posted, and the Treasure Hill story entered a new chapter.

Treasure Hill as a cultural landscape involves discourses on its relationship with the surrounding natural environment, its local history, and community identification. From this stance, conservation of Treasure-Hill has gathered enthusiastic support from intellectuals, NGOs, and local citizens. After a series of organized protest and intensive study, the city government took a few steps back to survey the feasibility of a plan revision. Soon the planning responsibility for Treasure Hill was transferred from the Department of Park and Recreation to the newly established Bureau of Cultural Affairs, the cultural imagination further deepened the polemic of programming a "planned" village out of an "ordinary" settlement by piecemeal evolution.

OURs (the Organization of Urban Re-s, one of the main facilitators of the former conservation movement) is later commissioned by the Bureau to undertake the planning task. The conservation project of the ‘Treasure Hill Co-living Village’ intends to propose a co-living commune which incorporates the original resident units as "welfare homeland – an alternative social housing," a youth hostel (to balance future financial cost), an ecological learning field, and an artivists (artist-cum-activist)-in-residency program. All the residents of the new village may share community spaces and facilities and various workshops for arts and creative industry. In the long run, all the labor put to the care of the community is hoped to be transferred as substitute for rent or meals. The restoration is expected to be completed by November 2010, and some of the original residents have already moved back to their houses and started to pay much-lower-than-market rent to the city. Social housing is, in this case, a homeland saved through struggle and action.

Werkpalast Lichtenberg
Berlin - Germany
Werkpalast Lichtenberg is a self-managed housing project within the Mietergenossenschaft SelbstBau e.G. on a property owned by Stiftung trias.

Men, women, children and senior citizens have come up to realize their vision of a collaborative living that appeals to people of all ages. This self-chosen environment with separate apartments within a housing community is supposed to allow individuality and community depending on the personal needs and based on tolerance, respect and mutual support.

One aspect of the housing community is also the ambition to live in an apartment within an urban environment that can be afforded by all social stratums. There are also other important aspects like self-management, social engagement and the implementation of ecological facets.
Wohnprojekt Wien
Wien - Austria
The Wohnprojekt Wien is currently the most siginificant lively sign of the Austrian collaborative housing scene. It iwas initiated in 2009 by a small group of activists and is currently expanding to a group of 80 people. In collaboration with a housing association and two teams of architects the project group has won a competition (public housing tender) in April 2010 and is thus be able to realise its idea of collaborative housing until 2013. Finally the project will house about 40 to 45 flats with about 100 inhabitants. Another house of the same size is situated on the same plot but is not part of the collaborative housing project.