Lecture Series ‘Housing Cooperatives International’: Past and present housing utopias in Vienna
6.30 PM – 8 PM
An event organized by B/IAS in cooperation with the S AM Swiss Architecture Museum.
Gabu Heindl provides a concise overview of the development and significance of non-profit and cooperative housing in Vienna. She shows how a highly regulated, non-speculative housing model has emerged that provides affordable living space for broad sections of the population and is deeply rooted in everyday urban life. It also becomes clear how much non-profit housing construction has shaped the architectural and urban quality of Vienna—through carefully planned residential complexes, communal spaces, and architecture that understands social infrastructure as an integral part of living. At the same time, the Vienna model also exhibits neoliberal traits and injustices, which Heindl discusses.
Starting from historical lines from Red Vienna to current self-organized and cooperative projects, the lecture examines how non-profit status, land policy, and collective forms of organization intertwine. It asks what lessons can be learned from this for today's debates on affordable housing, common goods, and non-market forms of housing—and how the "Vienna Model“ of social housing is thus becoming an internationally relevant reference point for social housing provision.
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
