How Co-Housing Initiatives Act to Prevent Social Marginalisation of Women

TOWARDS THE NON-SEXIST CITY HOW CO-HOUSING INITIATIVES ACT TO PREVENT SOCIAL MARGINALISATION OF WOMEN JACEK ANTONI KOSTRZEWA UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS LONDON

Towards the Non-Sexist City.

How Co-Housing Initiatives Act to Prevent Social Marginalisation of Women Jacek Antoni Kostrzewa University of the Arts London, 2021 Table of contents Introduction

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Description of terms

5

The body problem

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Women’s labour and the reason for co-housing

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First co-housing experiments: Hemgarden Centralkok

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Revolutionary kitchens for modern women: the Warsaw Co-Housing Initiative

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American material feminists and Dolores Hayden’s HOMES

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Co-housing today

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Conclusion

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Bibliography

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INTRODUCTION

In this work I will be researching the relation between the co-housing movement and the changing social and political situation of women since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. I will be analysing how the perception of the human form shaped cities and buildings and how this phenomenon influenced the patriarchal order of the build environment. I have researched the changing economical situation of the privileged and marginalized which had a direct influence on the shape of the ‘ideal home’.

The research I have conducted is based on the analysis of the case studies: first European co-housing initiatives in Stockholm, the Warsaw Co-Housing Initiative during the post First World War era, the American problem of the private suburban house and a proposition of its reworking, and finally the squats as an example of modern co-housing operatives.

Throughout the work I will be answering the questions: how co-housing initiatives may act to prevent social marginalisation of women and less privileged groups, and what opportunities co-housing as an alternative may give to the environment of the city.

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DESCRIPTION OF TERMS

As Dick Urban Vestbro and Liisa Horelli writes, ‘currently, gender is usually considered a dynamic and relational concept that refers to individual, inter-relational and institutional phenomena' (Vestbro and Horelli, 2012). Simone de Beauvoir’s statement that ‘one is not born, but becomes a woman' (1949, cited in Vestbro and Horelli, 2012) means ‘that whenever we talk about gender, we should consider its context.’ In this work I will be using the more conservative understanding of gender, as in the context of individual housing the conservative patterns tend to dominate (HETUS, 2001 cited in Vestbro and Horelli 2012).

This topic however is relatable to anyone who may be marginalized because of their belongingness to a minority group. I focus on the phenomenon of co-housing as an alternative for traditional dwelling, because, as I will show through case studies, it provides its inhabitants with several benefits emerging from the collective participation and division of domestic work. For ‘co-housing’ I will use the meaning suggested by Vestbro and Horelli (2012), which is ‘housing with common spaces and shared facilities.’

It should not be mistaken with ‘cooperative housing’ ‘since it often refers to the cooperative ownership of housing without common spaces or shared facilities’ (Vestbro, 2010 cited in Vestbro and Horelli, 2012).

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I did not find a direct definition of the term ‘non-sexist city’, however in all publications concerning the gender sensitive design, it is used in a similar sense. In Leslie Kern’s words, it essentially means ‘that every planning, policy, and budget decision is considered with the goal of gender equality as the departure point. […] This approach pushes cities to consider how decisions support or stymie the care work that literally keeps society functioning.’ (2020)

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THE BODY PROBLEM

I consider myself to be lucky to say, that I had a blissful and a stressfree childhood. As a single child I was always in the centre of attention of my entire family: parents, who both worked, grandparents, who took care of me whenever they could, and a group of friends, living in homes like mine. I lived in a single-family house close to the centre of Warsaw, in a neighbourhood with plenty of single homes with green gardens and cars parked in the front porches. As a white male, I did not stand out from my peers. I never felt frightened to be alone in public transport, in the park or in a darker alley leading to my house. I felt like the city had only more to offer, as I grew up.

Being able-bodied allowed me to travel freely wherever I wanted.

The cinemas, the football pitches, abandoned military fortifications, rooftop cafés, huge shopping malls, and thousands of undiscovered wonders of the streets that I had yet to visit – it seemed like was all for me. I have never felt unwanted or unwelcome in the space around me. Even as an architecture enthusiast, for most of my lifetime it did not came to my mind that my view of the city could be different if I have not been so privileged.

As feminist geographer Leslie Kern suggests in her book “Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World”, if we want to begin researching the mechanisms of oppression existing in modern cities, we should start from analysing the relation between our bodies and the built environment.

She describes her times of upbringing as relatively joyful. As a child, she felt

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safe to travel and discover cities, which she often did with her older brother.

However, as she grew older, she realized she could no longer feel as safe as she used to. She saw, that unlike her brother, her body become a target of unwanted attention and unpleasant comments. She did not feel safe to travel or walk alone. The fact, that the modern city was poorly adapted to her needs became fully transparent during her pregnancy. The lack of public lavatories and places to sit, malfunctioning elevators, unploughed pavements, the feeling of being judged for her baby crying in public – problems once invisible, became her everyday struggle.

Kern describes that the laborious task of taking care of her baby and having to work at the same time, made additionally difficult by the fact of her being a single parent, would be realistically impossible to manage without the help of her female colleagues who have been in similar situations.

By sharing responsibility for their children, on rare occasions she was able to focus on her academic work without other distractions. Through experiences such as those, and the fact that she shared them with others, it became apparent to her, that ‘this meeting point of bodies and cities is at the heart of “asking women’s questions” and thinking about the “feminist city”’ (Kern, 2020).

Norman Crowe, who researched the evolutionary roots of form and order in the built environment, argued that the spatial arrangements made by humans have been historically connected to the dimensions of their bodies. It seems like a logical conclusion - we build our homes to shelter our

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The body problem

human spatial forms - our bodies. He wonders whether the order of modern urban spaces has its source in the natural world and if this question is even possible to answer. He points out, that during the Renaissance, the idea of the “universal man”, which is rooted in the classical Platonian philosophy, begins to influence the western architectural thought. This idea is ‘based on the assumption that the cosmos was established at the onset to be in harmony throughout, and the human body is itself an echo of that divine harmony’ (Crowe, 1995 p. 92). He illustrates the problem of this theory with an example: compare the ideal proportions of a ballerina dancer and a sumo wrestler.

‘Neither really fits the proportions of the Vitruvian Man, but each is consistent and well balanced’(Crowe, 1995 p. 96).

This little experiment shows how, through different understanding of what is ideal, the matrix of the human body can be used to achieve entirely different results in the context of the building. The Vitruvian Man may represent the harmonious relationship between man and nature, however in a literal sense it puts an adult, male body in the centre of humanistic concern.

The same pattern is repeated almost five centuries later by Le Corbusier, whose Modulor, a concept of an ideal body with measurements that would be universal in both the metric and imperial unit system, is based on a stately British police officer.

Nowadays, while a belief that a universal system based on a one ideal body seems to be something of a past, it is still the male body measurements that regulates the city special order, for example the Toronto city’s guidelines

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for wind proofing the public spaces assume a “standard person” has a height, weight, and surface area which coincidentally corresponds to an adult male (Moore, 2019 cited in Kern, 2020).

All the above are symptoms of what Kern calls the manifestation of male power and privilege, which benefits from ‘keeping women’s movements limited and their ability to access different spaces constrained’ (Kern, 2020). The patriarchal special order, although unmasked, still functions, and the reason for it is that ‘any settlement is an inscription in space of the social relations in the society that built it - our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete.’ (Darke, 1996, cited in Kern, 2020).

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WOMEN’S LABOUR AND THE REASON FOR CO-HOUSING

‘In everyday life, the statements “the city is not for women” and “a woman’s place is in the city” are both true’(Kern,2020). Indeed, the city, with its unstoppable thirst for new workers, offer women a place to emancipate, even partially, through gaining financial independence. Frederic Engels saw the participation of women in the Industrial Revolution as beneficial for them, as it gave them an opportunity to step out of their homes, where they were once tied to the unpaid domestic labour (Burnette, 2008). Modern historians dispute whether it was a sign of emancipation. In the national census of Great Britain in 1851, almost fifty percent of the textile and clothing industry consisted of female laborers. Their wage however was on average four times lower than the males (Mitchell, 1962). It is important to remind that when the census was taken, and for the next thirty years, that is to the act of 1882, women in the Great Britain did not have a right to own or control any property (Married Women's Property Act 1882).

The processes of emancipation accelerated when the male population declined after the First and The Second World War. However, when the conflicts were over, women were once again pushed back to fulfil the old domestic roles. Hayden describes this problem as follows:

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[The problem] is paradoxical: women cannot improve their status in the home unless their overall economic position in society is altered; women cannot improve their status in the paid labour force unless their domestic responsibilities are altered. Therefore, a program to achieve economic and environmental justice for women requires, by definition, solution which overcomes the traditional divisions between the household and the market economy, the private dwelling, and the workplace. (Hayden, 1980 p.176)

As soliciting fair treatment and levelling wages has not been achieved to this day, it was practically impossible when women were not considered as legal entities. In individual houses, the conservative patterns of the culture and hierarchy tend to dominate. This means that the traditional distribution of housework continues in which women carry out far more domestic work than men (HETUS, 2001 cited in Vestbro and Horelli 2012). Because of the men’s act of what Patricia Mainardi called ‘feigning incompetence’ (Mainardi, 1970), women had no choice to either try to lead a double life as workers and compliant vestals or organize and collectively help each other with completion of their domestic chores. This might be, although not literally, what Leslie Kern interprets as the world-making power of female friendship:

In queer theory, world-making includes creative, disruptive, utopian, and even failed performances, practices, relationships, and imaginings that not only challenge structures like hetero- and homonormativity, public

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Women’s labour and the reason for co-housing

and private, etc., but that map queer, insurgent, other worlds beyond the already charted pathways. World-making means the process of both imagining and creating space(s) where things can unfold otherwise. Practicing female friendship as a way of life is, I think, a worldmaking activity. (Kern, 2020)

This queer world-making, nowadays connected more to the squatting practises, might have its beginning in the co-housing experiments that begun emerging in Europe of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Hayden points that the first known architectural project representing the ‘co-housing’ movement was that of the Otto Fick, who first introduced such a program in Copenhagen in 1903 (Hayden, 1980 p. 177). Similar spaces quickly begun emerging all around Europe, America, and USSR.

Called "service houses" or "collective houses," such projects provided childcare, cooked food along with housing for employed women and their families. [. . .] They aim at offering services, either on a commercial basis or subsidized by the state, to replace formerly private "women's work" performed in the households’ (Hayden, 1980 p. 177).

The socialization of the private house has been critiqued by many researchers, who believed that living processes could not be changed or fixed through external architectural interference. Many of the co-housing ideas were influenced by the utopian visions dating back to the Plato’s ideal settlement of Magnesia, or Thomas Moor’s ‘Utopia’ (Vest-

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bro and Horelli 2012). Radical social reordering proven to be ineffective or even dangerous, especially when it became a tool of national socialists in Germany and Italy in the years prior the Second World War.

After the War, ‘the ideas of the Utopian socialists were banned, and the European Utopians had to migrate to the USA to implement their ideas’ (Vestbro and Horelli 2012). However, as researcher Ruth Levinas writes the fact that the co-housing movements relate to the ideas developed partially by the socialist utopians should not discredit them, as ‘imagining a better organised life is a practical method leading to real day- to-day improvements’ (1990).

Considering the above, it is now reasonable to analyse the case studies of co-housing initiatives in the context of its planning and its history. Which parts of the private home could become transformed to become collective?

What kind of planning solution does it require? How does it benefit to the organisation of the domestic work?

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FIRST CO-HOUSING EXPERIMENTS: HEMGARDEN CENTRALKOK

First co-housing initiatives in Europe are extremely interesting, as after the year 1922 there have been no more of their kind. Their plans based on an idea of a single kitchen and laundry room for multiple residences. To a modern viewer they might even resemble a hotel much more then a housing estate. After the one of Otto Fick’s, the second co-housing estate is completed in Stockholm in 1907. ‘The motive for building this house was that the domestic servants kept demanding higher wages and shorter working hours.

The purpose was not to facilitate women to work outside the home, but to save costs by employing fewer servants (Hagstrom and Ekman 1971, cited in Vestbro and Horelli 2012). The building had sixty apartments with one of the ferst examples of central heating, however without private kitchens, maid’s rooms and with little space for storage.

Instead, a central kitchen and a bakery were placed in the basement.

Three meals a day could be ordered. These were sent to the flats through food lifts on each side of the staircases. After the meal, china and cutlery was sent back to the basement for cleaning. The servant staff also had the task of doing the laundry, room cleaning, shoe polish, sending messages etc (Vestbro 1982, cited in Vestbro and Horelli 2012).

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For the modernist architects, this method was a natural way of achieving the maximal functionality of the utility rooms. As social reformer Ava Myrdal writes in an article in 1932, it was purely logical to combine all the spaces, where an identical work in done every day, for example preparing food. In the collectivisation of the household work she saw an opportunity for the emancipation of women, who could spend more time outside of her home (Vestbro and Horelli 2012).

Hayden notes, that the first feminist co-housing designs fail to consider that the domestic work could be performed by both members of the household. She provides an example of the Cuban Family Code of 1974 that requires men to share housework and childcare within the private home (Hayden, 1980 p. 176). Because of the financial problems, in 1914 the shared kitchen closed, and soon after the building went bankrupt.

It was later transformed into a cholera hospital (Bostrom, 2008 p.156).

I could not find an explanation as of why this experimental house stopped functioning so soon after the completion. Perhaps the domestic work of women was evaluated too low, and the costs of running centralized domestic facilities became uneconomical. Because the residents were not supposed to do any domestic work, the solution was labelled as being for only the privileged people. It could not be subsided by the Swedish government. Hayden provides an alternative explanation for this phenomenon:

Most employed women are not interested in taking themselves and their families to live in communal families, nor are they interested in hav-

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First co-housing experiments: Hemgarden Centralkok

ing state bureaucracies run family life. They desire, not an end to private life altogether, but community services to support the private household.

They also desire solutions which reinforce their economic independence and maximize their personal choices about child rearing and sociability (1980 p.

181).

Figure 1. Floor plan of Hemgarden in Stockholm.

Hagstrom and Ekman, (1971) Hemgarden. [online image]. Avaliable at: <https://www.jstor.org/stable/23290266> [Accessed 1 April 2021]

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REVOLUTIONARY KITCHENS FOR MODERN WOMEN: THE WARSAW CO-HOUSING INITIATIVE

Warsaw Co-housing Initiative is, on the one hand, socialist and cooperative, and, on the other hand, avant-garde, and modernist. Its funders aimed to create a decent and healthy environment for the working class, which struggled because of the housing crisis during the years following the First World War. The architects - Barbara and Stanisław Brukalscy and Janina Jankowska – had to face the ideological problem: how to teach the factory workers a modern, urban way of living? How to organise them so they would not duplicate either their rural habits, with its strongly patriarchal structure, nor take new bourgeois lifestyles, with their habits based on exploitation?

Barbara Brukalska and Janina Jankowska played an essential role in the creation of the spatial order of the new co-housing developments, not only as designers, but as organisers of the life of the young community. Together, as socially involved special practitioners, they have run a guidance service called "My Apartment". It has been in service since 1932 and its purpose was housing counselling, issuing, and renting different types of furniture and equipment.

Brukalska focused on women, and Jankowska focused on children.

Jankowska designed equipment necessary for the care of a young child, that could be borrowed for a limited period by the members of the cooperative.

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On the other hand, Barbara Brukalska arranged apartments and kitchens for modern housewives. Her aim was to design modern in form, efficient and organized space for a woman who was busy with her professional job, so could not spend much time in the kitchen and other housework. Her model kitchen from 1927 was mentioned in numerous publications and has been described as a "revolutionary" solution. She based her design on the Frankfurt kitchen created in 1927 by Greta Schütte-Lihotzky, who was the first Austrian female architect. The kitchen had the modest dimensions of 2.20 m × 1.37 m, was an unseparated part of the living room, with a window, functional cabinets, and shelves. It has been brought just to the necessary minimum.

Brukalska's visions, however, went much further. During the World War Two she works in collaboration with architects, sociologists, and economists to prepare a brochure titled ‘Social Principles of Housing Development’ (1941), in which she describes her vision for a further collectivisation of the Warsaw Co-housing Initiative, by introducing collective eateries, inspired by the facilities that she saw in New York. Unfortunately, the destruction of the city in 1944 prevents her from further developing her plan.

As Magdalena Matysek-Imielińska argues, Brukalska’s kitchen design was an attempt to provoke modern way of life modelled on western democratic societies, where active women would go out for lunch, relax, and spend time together, and then prepare quickly and skilfully a family dinner. ‘The design of the Warsaw Co-housing Initiative assumes that not only a man, but also a woman and a child have their mental needs and should be able to find

21Revolutionary kitchens for modern women: the Warsaw Co-Housing Initiative

Figure 2. Brukalska's kitchen design.

Brukalska, B, (1927) Kuchnia. [online image]. Avaliable at: <https://formy.xyz/krotka-forma/dizajnerki-barbara-brukalska/> [Accessed 1 April 2021]

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time for intimacy and relaxation’ (Matysek-Imielińska, 2017).

Brukalska did not however limit her inventions to the subject of kitchen. To design roots that connect the housing estate to the city, she adjusts them to the life of the inhabitants. She assumes that the tram stop will attract the most amounts of dwellers on their everyday travel from and to work. Therefore, she suggests allocating business such as shoes reparations, underwear laundry services, pharmacies along the way ‘for the maximum savings of human time and forces’ (Brukalska 1941).

For Matysek-Imielińska it is no doubt, that Brukalska’s design were influenced by her feminine perspective, and knowledge of the everyday domestic duties. Historian Marta Leśniakowska notes that the experiment of the Warsaw Housing Co-operative gave a chance to emancipate one group of women but had a derogatory influence for other (2016). As the apartment layouts did not provide a space for maids, they were sometimes forced to sleep on the staircases. As most of the maid workforce arrived from the villages, after finding no work opportunities in the Initiative, they often required immediate help as not to become homeless.

To help them, in 1930, the female activists started a Circle of Active Cooperatives, which aimed to help unemployed women to find a job in one of the housing estate’s facilities. Their motto was to ‘raise the awareness and educate women on their social rights and, to remove any obstacles that prevent them from active participation in the national and international cooperative organisations’ (Święcicka, 1963). They have also provided a platform

23Revolutionary kitchens for modern women: the Warsaw Co-Housing Initiative

Figure 3. Aerial photo of the Warsaw Co-housing Initiative.

Author not known, (1960') Osiedle WSM na Żoliborzu. [online image]. Avaliable at: <https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Osiedle_WSM_na_%C5%BBoliborzu_w_latach_60.jpg> [Accessed 1 April 2021]

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where women could learn about their reproductive rights, the marriage law, and the right for social care.

Another innovation that emerged in the Initiative was a project of a kindergarten, that Jankowska developed with paediatrician doctor Landa, who due the nature of his work often cooperated with women. The institution was run by the Circle of Active Cooperatives. Mothers took turns in preparing meals, organising walks, reading books, and supervising the day care. Jankowska’s project, although restricted economically, was a great innovation. The example of the community being able to cooperate so well is exactly what Kern describes as a sign of female solidarity. She also mentions the research of Erin Wunker, who suggests ‘that prioritizing female friendship, even writing about it or representing it on the screen, is an act of insurgency that starts to unmake the tightly woven cloth of heteronormativity, capitalism, reproductive labour, and domesticity’ (2016).

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AMERICAN MATERIAL FEMINISTS AND DOLORES HAYDEN’S HOMES

America has a long tradition connected to the co-housing movement.

Material feminists, a group characterised by Hayden as the first advocates of the movement, ‘demanded a complete transformation of the spatial design and material culture of American homes, neighbourhoods, and cities’ (Hayden 1981, p. 3 cited in Vestbro and Horelli 2012). They have noticed a danger of the progressive privatisation of the American home. A big, suburban house was promoted as an embodiment of the ‘American dream’, in which the man was responsible for the financial stability, and the woman for the ‘emotional maintenance’. ‘Thus, the private suburban house was the stage set for the effective sexual division of labor. It was the commodity par excellence, a spur for male paid labor and a container for female unpaid labor’ (Hayden, 1980 p.172).

Ewen comments, that the existence of the suburban home was crucial for the industry, which advertised the need for new domestic appliances to in theory help the housewife, but in fact tied her even more to the endless loop of domestic work (Even, 1977, cited in Hayden, 1980 p.173). The single-family house was promoted both by the American government (‘in 1931 Hoover Commission on Home Ownership and Home Building established the private, single- family home as a national goal’ (Hayden, 1980 p.173)), and by numerous private corporations, like General Electronics.

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The television series ‘Mad Men’ (2007) illustrated how the excluded suburban house influenced life of its inhabitants and degraded their mental health. Betty Draper, played by January Jones, is practically being a prisoner in her own house. Her illness prevented her from using a car, without which she could not take her children to school or travel. The extensive distances of the suburban housing developments of New York are exactly what Darke describes as ‘patriarchy written in stone’ (1996).

Co-housing movements understandably suffered from the capitalist need of mass consumption. The idea of sharing spaces and appliances could not be favoured, as it simply restrained the corporate profit. The ideas of material feminists, although modern and logical, became forgotten for almost a century. Dolores Hayden, who was both an academic researcher and an architect, attempted to remind the American public of their exceptional heritage. In her work from 1980, she proposed an architectural program that would change the way ‘Americans deal with private life and public responsibilities’. She introduced HOMES - Homemakers Organization for a More Egalitarian Society. Its main goal was to encourage of both man and woman to share responsibilities for the unpaid domestic work, eliminate residential segregation, minimalize the wasteful energy consumption, and maximalise socialisation. The program would be implemented by existing feminist groups, ‘through renovation of existing neighborhoods or through new construction’ (Hayden, 1980).

For the first time in the history of the co-housing initiatives this pro-

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American material feminists and Dolores Hayden’s HOMES

ject takes into consideration the fluid nature of the family, which is not always composed of two heterosexual parents and their children:

Suppose forty households in a U.S. metropolitan area formed a HOMES group and that those households, in their composition, represented the social structure of the American population as a whole. Those forty households would include: seven single parents and their fourteen children (15 percent); sixteen two-worker couples and their twenty-four children (40 percent); thirteen one-worker couples and their twenty-six children (35 percent); and four single residents, some of them "dis- placed homemakers" (10 percent) (Hayden, 1980).

In order to provide living space for all of these family groups and continue the feminist idea of increasing the use and accessibility to the urban spaces, she proposes that a standard suburb single family home could be remodelled. In the backyards of the houses, which were once just private, separated gardens, she invents a number of new collective spaces: a playing area, an outdoor table area or a vegetable garden. Then, she remodels the standard house to introduce new spaces, a day-care for children, laundry, a grocery depot, an office, or a shared kitchen, all in the direct proximity to the dwellings. A house could be divided inside to shelter smaller family units, that she characterized above. The new urban order is designed to enable the community space to ‘flow’ around the houses. Hayden describes, that due to the resemblance of the suburbs across the continent, this order could be eas

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Figure 4. Suburban neighborhood, block plan. B, Proposed HOMES revitalization.

Hayden, d. (1980) [online image]. Avaliable at: <https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173814> [Accessed 1 April 2021]

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American material feminists and Dolores Hayden’s HOMES

ily duplicated. She encourages the existing feminist and co-housing groups to implement HOMES in their surroundings. At the final page of her essay ‘What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like?’ she speculates about the future of the co-housing:

When all homemakers recognize that they are struggling against both gender stereotypes and wage discrimination, when they see that social, economic, and environmental changes are necessary to overcome these conditions, they will no longer tolerate housing and cities, designed around the principles of another era, that proclaim that ‘a woman's place is in the home’ (1980).

Undoubtedly, the HOMES project was ahead of its times. Since the publication in 1980, the world was hit by several financial crisis, and most of them were fuelled by the unstoppable demand for the private house. The financial crash of 2008 severely affected the suburban areas all around the American continent. Despites that, the trend seems to be unchanged. As Justine Lloyd writes:

Nearly 40 years on, society’s profile has evolved further. We are having fewer children, more of us live alone, and women are in paid employment in ever-greater numbers. And yet, despite this, the design of the modern city suggests urban planners may still be perpetuating stereotypes of the patriarchal family. We have some way to create a more equal city.(2018)

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Hayden’s HOMES, in my opinion, could offer an opportunity for the post COVID-19 reality. Social distancing measures have forced people to function inside their social bubbles and to move their working spaces to the boundaries of their homes. It may be arguable, whether HOMES groups would provide a safer environment, it would however be helpful in tackling the crisis of loneliness. The co-housing encourages stronger connections between people, through the acts of sharing space and dividing the responsibility for it. I suspect, that if the initiatives such as HOMES were more represented around the world, people would be better prepared to the shift in the typology of work that the global pandemic caused.

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CO-HOUSING TODAY

The feminist research has been expanding its scope for the past decades, and it had a significant impact on the branches of geography and urban planning. Thanks to the work of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw on intersectionality, the complex nature of social discrimination begun to be better understood. As she writes in The Combahee River Collective Statement, ‘we need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives’ (1977).

In the context of intersectionability, the problem of social marginalisation in the urban spaces goes beyond the category of gender and characteristics assigned to it. It makes the challenge of designing homes more complex than before. To this point, we have been focusing about women and assuming that they will eventually start their own families and get work with a fair wage. We have not yet been talking about people, for whom this is additionally difficult because of the discrimination related to their ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. As Kern writes,

the traditional nuclear family is no longer the norm. Cities are full of blended families, complex kinship relations entailed by divorce and remarriage, lone parents, queer relationships, polyamorous families, foster families, migration of family members, non-family households, multigeneration households, empty nesters, and more (2020).

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The changing definition of family and better understanding of the mechanisms of discrimination puts new challenges to the co-housing movements and does not make the questions historically raised by them unrelatable or outdated. Many of those movements function today and provide crucial living space for the most socially excluded.

The squat movement, which originated before the first co-housing initiatives, might be characterised as a different type of special organism, however I believe it is worth mentioning in the context of this work. The existence of squats, similarly to the co-housing developments, results from the bottom-up cooperation of the people, who were often oppressed and marginalised. For example, the Warsaw squat ‘Syrena’ became an important place of LGBTQ+ resistance to the systemic oppression and politics of the right-wing government of PiS. The squat’s motto is to provide ‘free houses for the free people’ (Kolektyw Syrena, 2013). It functions as a collective house: it provides a place to sleep, to work and to eat. It also echoes the premises of the Warsaw Co-Housing Initiatie – it actively helps its inhabitants to secure work and educates about human and citizen rights.

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Co-housing today

Figure 5. Collective kitchen at the Syrena squat. syrenawarszawa. [online image]. Avaliable at: <https://syrena.org/about/> [Accessed 1 April 2021]

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CONCLUSION

The co-housing movements around the world vary in popularity. In the United States, only an estimated 0.001% of the entire population resides in a co-housing (Williams, 2008 cited in Vestbro and Horelli, 2012). In Zurich, on the contrary, as much as one quoter of the entire housing stock is managed by co-housing groups. Many collective dwellers form informal groups, such as squatters, are not counted in those statistics. The overall popularity of co-housing, with its premises of collective work, support and emancipation is disproportionally low, when compared to the universality of the problems it can tackle. I suppose it may be like this for three main reasons: first is that the full emancipation of women and less privileged members of the society is still yet to happen, second is that because of the political reasons it was rejected by the Western society because of the connotations of the co-housing ideas with socialist and utopian philosophy, and the third is that the architects and urban planners did not yet find a spatial solution, that would be perfect solution. It might be a mixture of all those reasons that we do not see more co-housing today.

It is debatable, however, if from an architectural point, achieving a perfect plan that would resolve the problem of urban exclusion is even achievable. The research that I have outlined in the ‘body problem’ chapter of my work clearly shows that architecture cannot be designed basing on an image of a one perfect entity, on ideal body. As society and humans change,

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their needs change with them. There is no one perfect container, that would be able to provide a shelter for all these changing needs.

Nevertheless, co-housing provides an alternative view to the way we think about houses today. The research of feminist scientists, thinkers and geographers exposes the patriarchal order, which is so deeply rooted in the spatial environment, it might be called by some ‘natural’. The feminist research enabled the co-housing to exist, and with it, brought an entirely new perspective, which full potential is still yet to be discovered. Collective housing might bring new solutions in sustainability. Sharing resources can drastically lower the amount of consumption and waste. Considering friendship and solidarity as a force that has a ‘world building’ potential may show new directions for the young architects. If they understand this potential well, they will hopefully pave the way for the non-sexist city of tomorrow.

Bibliography 1. Hayden, D. (1980) What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human Work. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

2. Wekerle, G. (1988) Canadian Women Housing Cooperatives. Case Studies in Physical and Social Innovation. Vancouver: University of British Colombia Press 3. Burnette, J. (2008) Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain .Cambridge University Press 4. Mitchell. J (1834) The report to the Central Board of Commissioners, respecting the Returns made from the Factories, and the Results obtained from them. British Parliamentary Papers 5. Mainardi, P. (1970) The Politics of Housework. New York: Redstockings 6. Levitas, R. (1990) Concept of utopia, Syracuse University Press, New York 7. Święcicka, J. (1963) O pracy spółdzielczej wśród kobiet w latach 1928– 1939, w: Wspomnienia działaczy spółdzielczych. Tom I. Warsaw: Zakład Wydawniczy CRS 8. Leśniakowska, M. (2004) Modernistka w kuchni. Barbara Brukalska, Grete Schütte-Lihotzky i „polityka kuchenna”, in „Konteksty. Polska Sztuka Ludowa”.

9. Wunker, E. (2016) Notes from a Feminist Killjoy. Toronto: Book*hug 10. Married Women's Property Act 1882

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11. Kale, S. (2019) 'It's going to be our little paradise': can co-ops solve the housing crisis? The Guardian 12. Smith, B. (1983) Home Girls, A Black Feminist Anthology. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Inc. 13. Kern, L. (2020) Feminist City. Claiming Space in the Man-Made World.

London: Verso 14. Vestbro, D. and Horelli, L. (2012) Design for Gender Equality: The History of Co-Housing Ideas and Realities. Alexandrine Press 15. Matysek-Imielińska, M. (2017) Projektantki i Performerki Przedwojennego Osiedla Żoliborz. Wrocław: Przegląd Kulturoznawczy 16. Matysek-Imielińska, M. (2018) Miasto w działaniu. WSM – dobro wspólne w epoce nowoczesnej. Warsaw: Bec Zmiana 17. Crowe, N. (1995) Nature and the Idea of a Man-Made World. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Online Sources 1. < https://syrena.org/about/ > 2. < https://theconversation.com/how-far-have-we-come-since-the-80svision-of-the-non-sexist-city-99602 > 3. < https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/mar/27/can-co-opssolve-the-housing-crisis > 4. < https://formy.xyz/krotka-forma/dizajnerki-barbara-brukalska/ >

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Figures Hagstrom and Ekman, (1971) Hemgarden. [online image]. Avaliable at: <https://www.jstor.org/stable/23290266> [Accessed 1 April 2021] Brukalska, B, (1927) Kuchnia. [online image]. Avaliable at: <https:// formy.xyz/krotka-forma/dizajnerki-barbara-brukalska/> [Accessed 1 April 2021] Author not known, (1960') Osiedle WSM na Żoliborzu. [online image].

Avaliable at: <https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Osiedle_WSM_ na_%C5%BBoliborzu_w_latach_60.jpg> [Accessed 1 April 2021] Hayden, d. (1980) [online image]. Avaliable at: <https://www.jstor.org/ stable/3173814> [Accessed 1 April 2021] syrenawarszawa. [online image]. Avaliable at: <https://syrena.org/ about/> [Accessed 1 April 2021]

Towards the Non-Sexist City.

How Co-Housing Initiatives Act to Prevent Social Marginalisation of Women Jacek Antoni Kostrzewa University of the Arts London, 2021