At a time when housing has become such a pressing social, economic, and political issue, it is important to ask the questions: how do we actually want to live together? And how do the places we live in get produced? Examining international examples of innovative, self-determined housing reveals the fundamental connection between modes of production and habitation.

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How can our domestic environments reflect emergent patterns of daily life to create resilient social spatial configurations? Can multi-residential environments offer more than an atomised accumulation of individual units and traverse the polarity of the house vs the apartment; a polarity evident in housing typologies in Ireland and ingrained in the national psyche? Challenging the established model requires alternatives to reductive developer-led/market-driven housing provision which distorts our relationship to the places we inhabit by turning them into high-risk commodities.

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The Translating Housing research project briefly described in this article sought to explore these questions by analysing a series of Berlin-based case studies of diverse and innovative approaches to housing typologies, financing, and development models, in particular various forms of co-housing.

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These Baugruppen (building groups) and particular forms of Baugenossenschaften (building co-operatives) have involved groups of people coming together to secure sites or empty buildings, design their future homes collectively, and in some case participate in aspects of the building process. These forms of self-organised housing are customised to residents’ needs regarding size, layout, interior fit-out, etc. By eliminating the risk – and associated profit margins – of building investors/developers, the buildings that emerge from these processes are generally of a higher quality and more cost-effective than traditional alternatives.

Baugruppen projects effectively divide the finished building into individual apartments within a larger framework as collectively agreed by all residents. Baugenossenschaften provide affordable housing in the middle ground between ownership and rented accommodation, such that cooperative members are simultaneously both landlords and tenants, and the building is effectively independent of the free market’s speculative circle [1].

The negotiation inherent to such projects allows the tensions and potentials sparked by individual and shared needs and aspirations to be explored. Amenities that would not be financially feasible for individual households – shared roof terraces, collective kitchens, guest apartments, common gardens, shared workspaces, etc. – are made possible by collective investment. These resources support the social resilience and flexibility of collective housing models, and were particularly valuable during COVID-19 lockdowns [2].

The diversity of dwelling types typical of these medium- to high-density residential typologies is often coupled with a reciprocal flexibility, allowing rooms or spaces to be transferred, or dwelling units to being swapped as residents up-scale, down-scale, or adjust their live-work configurations. The Ritterstrasse 50 project, by architects Ifau and Jesko Fezer and Heide and von Beckerath, for client GbR Ritterstrasse 50, is a good example of how this designed flexibility works. Simplicity in the building’s volume, structural strategy, and services design allows for highly personalised internal spatial configurations, with no two apartment layouts being the same.  

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Ritterstrasse 50 also illustrates the significance of shared spaces and facilities. Its generous common areas include a 159m² two-storey common area in the lobby, a roof terrace with summer kitchen, a laundry room, a shared wrap-around balcony, and a garden.

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Our Translating Housing research developed a methodology to illustrate the location and relationship of such spaces to the building’s organisation. These drawings are cross-referenced to specially developed graphic representations of the density, construction and site costs, programmatic mixture, shared and private amenity provision, and the organisational and funding models of each project. This methodology foregrounds the interconnection between design intent and underlying financial and organisational models, as it is only through an understanding of these interrelationships that the case studies can inform our thinking in other contexts.

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Berlin’s development authority plays an important role in facilitating these self-generating projects: by strategically using its own land assets, and by accommodating smaller networks, not just large housing providers. These strategies could be instructive for Ireland, as has been outlined by SOA (Self-Organised Architecture) [3] who suggest that such state facilitation could take the form of sale or allocation by lease of public land for community-led housing initiatives based on such European models [4].

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For example, at Ritterstrasse, a ‘concept-driven’ sales process was used, meaning the site was sold not for the highest offered price, but for the best value for the city in terms of social, architectural, urban, and environmental criteria. Ritterstrasse 50 was selected because it proposed giving back part of the site as green space to the surrounding housing. Its emphasis on collective spaces and participatory planning processes was seen as an example of best practice for urban housing; a practice of people making the city and in so doing taking responsibility for it.