“A true home is the place—any place—where growth is nurtured,” bell hooks writes in the final chapter of her book Belonging: A Culture of Place, before offering us the stipulation “where there is constancy.”

A home is more than just a building. It’s where we strive to find privacy and a sense of security, a place to meet our needs of food, rest, and emotional connection. Our idea of home has also long been tied to cultural standards of family structure and privacy; as those have shifted, so have the types of housing we inhabit.

What, today, is home?

One type of housing that seems to be appearing again at the forefront is co-living, traditionally defined as an intentional community in which the inhabitants share housing and living facilities and come together over a common set of values. This is by no means a new phenomenon; historical examples range from the longhouses that can be found across cultural contexts to medieval European communal living arrangements in which an extended network of family and friends often cycled through and occupied a home at various times, blurring distinctions between public and private.

The modern co-living movement that is most widely-known and emulated has its roots in Denmark: a group of private houses are clustered around shared common spaces such as kitchens, gardens, walkways, and parking. Now commonplace in Denmark, this housing and development typology has also become popular throughout Europe, though it doesn’t yet seem to have caught on beyond the continent at a similar scale.

But restricting our history of co-living to just this modern example of co-housing, with its private houses and shared yards, overlooks other instructive models with longer histories. Timing and political context matter; each explain why many of the largest cooperative housing developments we know of in North America and Europe were built by unions and socialist municipal governments. Theirs was a fight to secure housing as a basic right, not as a commodity to be bought and sold. In a time of housing insecurity and exploitation, can we turn to cooperative housing as a solution? What role should governments play in facilitating this.

Dedicating a portion of this publication to co-living required us to draw on our own sociological and design imaginations. Housing has long been the way in which architects and designers materialized ideas about society, where they gave form to eternal political questions about how we live with one another, who gets to own what, and who gets to live where. To explore this topic in a nuanced and critical way, we had to expand the notion of co-living beyond hippie communes, dorm-style buildings, and clustered housing blocks, and look at ways in which people build relationships to sustain communal forms of life. It was just as important to look outside of North America and Western Europe to gain a more complex grasp of how co-living takes different forms across the globe. It’s our view that this could be a rich source of inspiration for designers to be truly social and innovative, and each of the articles presented here provides case studies and insights that critique, celebrate, explore, and investigate what “co-living” means.

Sam Holleran shares some longstanding examples from Europe, such as Germany’s Baugrauppen and Zürich’s Genossenschaft, while also cautioning us about the dangers of glorifying these projects. They can take a long time to develop and usually must shed their more anarchist and ambitious beginnings in order to work financially, legally, and politically. Holleran provokes us to think ambitiously about how we approach co- living and -housing; can we build not just cooperative housing but cooperative cities?

In the United States, after decades of a post-war experimentation in which homeownership was pushed as a means of building wealth and the nuclear family was the key social unit—in turn creating a boom and bust real estate market and widespread social isolation—we now see a growing interest in all forms of co-living. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly the causes of this current curiosity, but we can ascertain that it is due to some combination of changing economic circumstances, a global urban housing crisis in which people are being priced out, and a desire to be connected to a sense of community. In her 2016 book, The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream, journalist Courtney Martin documents the ways in which many Americans are reconsidering their definition of success, turning away from the material markers of wealth and towards emotional and spiritual markers such as community and creativity. Martin writes that

“the most reliable wealth is in relationships.”

But, in a global consumer culture that prizes the individual, do we run the risk of turning co-living into a lifestyle brand?

Sarah Treleaven delves into these questions while documenting a certain type of for-profit co-living venture emerging in affluent cities and marketed towards tech employees and freelancers. When housing is, as architect Susanne Schindler remarks, seen as “a socioeconomic product to be delivered at the least possible cost to the public sector, while generating maximum economic benefit to private developers,” are we simply consumers of the places we live? In drawing out the connections between a crushing economic reality for the middle class, the lifestyle goals of a young urbanite gentry, the power of real estate, and Instagram, Treleaven forces us to question who exactly many of these co-living places are for and who they benefit.

In the same ways that values of “connection” have been used by Facebook to further isolate us in pursuit of power and wealth, the many for-profit versions of co-living we see bandied about also run the risk of creating enclaves of well-off urbanites—too poor to buy homes in the current market, but high-earning enough to buy into an “adult dorm” that caters to their aspirational lifestyle. We know that as people grow more affluent, they tend to purchase larger homes and consume more square footage, and the boundaries of the private domain expand outwards. Another ascendant living arrangement is solo living, and as sociologist Eric Klinenberg argued in his 2012 book Going Solo, this novel phenomenon is reshaping culture, politics, and economics. Contrary to what we may expect, Klinenberg finds that many people who live alone, usually in cities, lead rich social lives and have a close-knit sense of belonging and community. This challenges our assumptions about the inherent values and advantages of co-living and forces us to reconsider the boundaries of this topic. Yet, there is still a need to build places for people to gather and rediscover what it means to maintain a public life together.

By limiting our editorial scope to different forms of shared housing, were we missing out on larger questions? What was originally intended to be an exploration of intentional forms of cohousing and co-living today felt restrictive. We set out to find examples that would require us to think more critically about what co-living actually entails, not just in terms of a building, but at the scale of the neighborhood and the city and across differences in economic and cultural life. We must think of where we live as more than just a shelter, but how we balance our private and public lives and build solidarity with one another.

Solidarity is a tricky concept. In our current popular usage, it often is conflated with “empathy” and pops up often in branded slogans and cause marketing. But the word denotes something deeper, something that sociologist Emile Durkheim called a “shared sense of the sacred.” In every society, he says, there are rituals that are considered sacred or profane, and they tie a group of people together in a web of meaning and collective action. And yet, as Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix commented in an article for The New Republic this past August,

Solidarity is often invoked by cooperatives born out of political struggle as something that is built and maintained only through working together—metaphorically tilling the soil of the gardens we want to reap together. In her discussion with Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson, Hilary Malson introduces us to a group that expands our notion of co-living beyond the home and towards broader community liberation. Cooperation Jackson’s work in Jackson, Mississippi, demonstrates that the formation of an alternative and more just economic system requires collective ownership of land. Furthermore, the relationship people hold to land and economy is also indicative of the relationships that people hold to one another. It is impossible to have an honest discussion about different forms of co-living in America without reckoning with this country’s racial history; nearly all cities and communities in America are spatial expressions of racial capitalism. Malson then turns a critical eye on designers and planners; if these forms of injustice were acts of design, what are the responsibilities of contemporary designers and planners to propose new systems based on principles of cooperation and justice?

One of the starkest examples of American segregation is evident in the differences between Manhattan and the Bronx. These two New York City boroughs are separated by a river less than a mile wide but could not be further apart in terms of economic privilege. In the South Bronx, which has a deep history of political organizing, we meet Hydro Punk, a collective whose fierce advocacy for cultural autonomy and access has made them leaders in anti-displacement activism. Co-founder Monica Flores reminds us that living together is also about protecting and valuing culture and creative production, both of which always inform how we see ourselves, individually and collectively.

Who makes a place? What gives form to the spaces that limit or enable how we live together? Everything has been designed to a certain extent and, echoing adrienne maree brown’s explanation on emergent strategy, design is relational. All relationships are influenced by power, so we have to understand power in whatever system we look at, as well as how power dictates our capacities of imagination.

In my interview with Emiliano Gandolfi, co-founder of Cohabitation Strategies, he helps elucidate the importance of personal transformation and collective imagination in building emancipatory forms of co-living and the many ways in which designers can activate this collective imagination. Bursting open the disciplinary boundaries of what is considered a designer helps us to re-enter the realm of the social and energizes what is considered an act of design.

When engaging in socially responsive design, how do we differentiate between what is activism and what is design? Oftentimes they are inseparable, as the most effective forms of activism do more than just protest what currently exists, but rather draw from a source of collective imagination to create and demand viable alternatives. Concurrently, the ability for people to come together to create their own communities and housing can only be the result of years of organizing. In Uruguay, Arianna Gil activates an intergenerational conversation with her father and grandfather to show us how FUCVAM, one of the boldest examples of collective living, came to be through a social movement for housing. In this mutual-support housing cooperative, operated hyper-locally, working-class people design and build each other's houses through a system of democratic decision-making and collaborative design.

Can design and urbanism be understood as both creative and political? This question is also posed by Aseen Inam, who uses as his case study the example of the Orangi Pilot Project, which began in Karachi, Pakistan in 1980. Through the advocacy and grassroots organizing of residents in Orangi Town, what started as a collective effort to build a low-cost sanitation system turned into a larger endeavor to upgrade housing, health, and finance in a settlement of 1 million squatters.

More recently, in São Paolo, Brazil, Michael Fox visited residents of a number of housing occupations in the city’s center. Roughly 6,000 homeless families are currently living in about 70 occupied buildings, and Fox offers firsthand account of how groups of people have worked together to utilize formerly vacant buildings according to their urgent needs.

Meanwhile, back in Germany, curator Elke Krasny introduces us to the ZUsammenKUNFT, in which a group of artists and activists also illegally occupied a vacant building, using a variety of strategies to enable and instigate what is now a larger neighborhood project. Krasny challenges us to reorient our attitude towards design from ideas about entrepreneurship and innovation towards an ethic of care, in order to build and sustain the fragile ecosystems of compassion and home. Design can be small acts of worldmaking that shelter us and help us move through life, while at the same time prototyping alternative visions for the future.

Ultimately, co-living is also a question. What does it mean to live together? Often unexamined is what we are saying when we put "co" as a preface. Cooperative, community, confluence, commons, conviviality—all existence is also a matter of co-existence. There is no way to exist together without the deep human work of cooperation, and the fundamental endeavor of society and culture requires confronting the challenges of how we learn and struggle to build lives together.

Systems of exclusion and oppression boil down to someone making the claim that someone else—the “other”—is not worthy of the same life that they have. That they are not worthy to live in the same neighborhoods, send their kids to the same schools, have the same quality of food, access the same care, breathe the same air. Left unchecked, even the smallest iteration of exclusionary logic can extend and contort itself to denying others the right to live; this is a betrayal of the greater common cause of humanity.

Concluding her book, bell hooks leaves with us a quote from P. Travis Kroeker:

 Community is a shared survival strategy: we each find the means to secure our own future through exchange and negotiation with others. These nine texts remind us that the question of co-living will always require examining our entanglements with identity, space, politics, finance, culture, and power.

Joal Stein is a civic curator and strategist focused on investigating spatial and social power through contemporary culture, working across art, urbanism, architecture, and social engagement.