Lecture Series ‘Housing Cooperatives International’: Public Interest Beyond the Market in Denmark
6.30 PM – 8 PM
An event organized by Ivo Balmer in cooperation with the S AM Swiss Architecture Museum.
Henrik Larsen will examine how Denmark’s housing cooperatives have developed as a distinct third way between state provision and market-driven development. As long-standing forms of non-profit, collectively owned housing, these cooperatives demonstrate how durable and socially oriented neighbourhoods can emerge when collective governance, limited-profit principles, and long-term stewardship are aligned. His lecture will highlight the crucial role that the broader Danish non-profit housing sector plays within the national housing system, where strong regulation, public oversight, and a tradition of collective responsibility have created a robust foundation for socially accessible housing. At the same time, he will address the structural challenges that arise when cooperative and other non-profit housing models encounter financialisation and growing market pressures.
In the context of the S AM exhibition, the lecture underscores how the Danish experience with both housing cooperatives and the wider non-profit housing sector offers valuable insights for addressing the current housing crisis: it shows that resilient, affordable, and socially equitable housing solutions can be realised when civil society initiatives, public regulation, and cooperative organisational forms work in concert.
With: Henrik Gutzon Larsen - Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Lund University. His research focuses on housing systems, cooperative housing, and the political economy of urban development, with a particular emphasis on how non-market housing models evolve under changing state and market conditions.
Location: S AM Swiss Architecture Museum, Steinberg 7, 4051 Basel
Admission: free
Pictures: Ivo Balmer
