The Initiative for Collaborative Building and Housing (Initiative für gemeinschaftliches Bauen und Wohnen / IgBW) works to develop the legal, organisational and economic conditions to allow and encourage people to organise and build their own collaborative housing projects. Among these conditions are networking, consulting and information, adaptation of funding requirements, new financing and credit models, know-how transfer and, above all, the tendering of affordable building parcels for collaborative housing projects by public owners.

Our objective is not to realise a certain co-housing project but to establish a “Co-Housing-Culture” as part of the housing policy in Austria. That means that we want to improve the general conditions so that it becomes easier to initiate a project and to successfully realise it.

·      We represent the interests of co-housing projects.
·      We put the subject of co-housing on the agenda in the media and in public discussions.
·      We collect information and knowledge about the topic and spread it for example in workshops and discussions.
·      We bring together experts and laymen and try to give orientation on the housing market for private persons who want to co-house.
·      We work on new models how projects can come into being.

General situation:

Austria and, especially, Vienna are pioneer regions of collaborative housing, many projects have been realized between the 1960s and 1990s - a publication in 1987 counted approx. 140 in Austria (Freisitzer, Koch, Uhl: Mitbestimmung im Wohnbau. Ein Handbuch, Wien 1987). But this development came to a complete halt around 2000, and during the last ten years, almost no new projects were built. Parallel to that, collaborative housing projects became a big topic in many German cities and regions. In 2009, new projects came up and right now a new blossom of such projects can be noticed. We are optimistic this trend will go on and become stronger.

At the moment the focus of our initiative is on Vienna because most of our members live there, but we also have members in other cities and provinces. A fact is that housing policy is regulated by the provinces, which means that for legal changes in housing matters you have to address to that political level. We found that it is often more easy to start a co-housing project in rural areas, where the property market is much more relaxed, but on the other hand it is more difficult to find members.

Strategy:

In the first year (2009-2010) our initiative developed quite well, not so much concerning member numbers (40 members), but we managed to elect the board with eight members and we have some more people actively putting their time into it. Many people took part in the events we organized, like discussions, networking-meetings and information-evenings, and we also managed to put the subject into the media.

The City of Vienna recently put someone in charge for co-housing matters and proclaimed that they could imagine offering land to collaborative housing projects not only in the development area of Aspern, where they had started this year, but also in other areas which are hopefully more centrally located.