Lecture Series ‘Housing Cooperatives International’: The Everyday Practice of Cooperative Living in Vienna
6.30 PM – 8 PM
An event organized by Ivo Balmer in cooperation with the S AM Swiss Architecture Museum.
Gabu Heindl offers a concise overview of the development and significance of non-profit and cooperative housing in Vienna. She shows how a strongly regulated, non-speculative housing model has emerged there, providing affordable homes for broad parts of the population and becoming an integral part of everyday urban life. She highlights how non-profit housing has profoundly shaped Vienna’s architectural and urban quality – through carefully designed housing complexes, well-crafted communal spaces, and an architectural culture that understands social infrastructure as an essential component of living. Drawing on historical trajectories and current examples, Heindl explains how non-profit principles, land policy, and collective organisational forms interlock, making Vienna an international reference for socially oriented housing provision.
The lecture also asks what lessons can be drawn from the Viennese model – from early municipal estates to today’s self-organised and cooperative initiatives – for current debates on affordability, commons-based approaches, and non-market housing. In doing so, Heindl opens a perspective on how Vienna contributes important impulses to international discussions on non-profit and cooperative housing models.
With: Gabu Heindl – architect, urban planner, activist, and professor at the University of Kassel. She has been engaged for many years with the Viennese model of social and non-profit housing, as well as with non-market, collectively organized forms of housing.
Location: S AM Swiss Architecture Museum, Steinberg 7, 4051 Basel
Admission: free
Picture: Ivo Balmer
