Housing Practice

of people coming together to pay and construct the building, with the help of a manager and builder. One of the main architects of the building decided to be one of the nineteen occupants as well.

R50 is located within Kreuzberg, which was once Berlin’s poorest area. It became a hotspot for counterculture after the Berlin Wall came down, now hosting multiple museums, galleries, trendy restaurants, and cafes. The neighborhood (Kiez), is largely made up of the Turkish community. In a micro scale, the surrounding buildings that envelop R50 are all previous housing complexes; from IBA social housing to social housing.

With nineteen distinct flats, each designed purposefully for its individual users, each unit comes out to about 80-132 square meters. The cost of each flat per square meter is 2150 Euros, and with public space factored in, 2350 Euros. The median price of Kreuzberg properties at the time of this development was 2950 Euros per square meter.

The building sits on the property not fully taking up its entirety, keeping the surrounding vegetation and creating a shared garden. Each unit was carefully designed by the architects with the help of the occupants. Forty to fifty meetings were conducted every two weeks for a year and a half to finalize each unit and the needs of each unit owner, as well as the necessary shared spaces, their sizes, and locations. The 19 flats are heavily flexible in terms of its interior with false and movable walls within each unit. The location of R50 is in close proximity to other housing developments, almost like a suburban area, but still with a cultural vibrance due to its Turkish community and heritage, as well as the museums and galleries nearby. The building’s structural elements are made up of reinforced concrete and a steel-attached mesh wire balcony around the perimeter on every floor. This type of wire mesh construction is also locally available and cost efficient. A central core with a lift and staircase is located in the middle of the building, creating a massive column within the structure, allowing the other columns to be placed at the outer walls. This opens up the floor plate with six meter spans in all directions. Ramps are available at the entrance of the building, making it accessible from the street side to the ground floor area.With bicycle parking, and mini studios for each owner, these communal spaces are divided equally among tenants. The winter garden room is a shared living room with a double height ceiling, with fully glazed windows and located at the ground floor. This is a place for meetings and moments when users want to be outside of their apartments or play music on the baby piano, but still be inside the building. It also has a guest room at the second level, which can be used by any of the tenants’ guests if needed.

The shortage of housing stock in Germany’s urban centers, lack of newly constructed public housing, and the sale of existing public housing to private controllers have all heightened anxieties. The time for alternatives is now. This ideology of Baugruppen has become a solution to the current state of Berlin’s housing situation, and in that sense has brought about a positive impact to the city. It is a more affordable and sustainable way of attaining property. The group assembled includes architects, artists, and journalists. They all essentially bought into the project, with everyone purchasing his or her unit in the building on spec before it had even been developed. The thing that elevates R50 beyond just a clever financing model is that it was designed with the intensive participation of its residents. The architects facilitated the process, starting with the founding of the building group, leading participatory planning and design meetings. R50 is a comparative bargain as it was sold per square meter at 2350 Euros (including shared spaces) versus the Kreuzberg market at 2950 Euros. (Bridger, J. 2015)

The communal aspect of Baugruppen hangs perpetually in the balance with individual ownership. While the original residents might uphold the underlying tenets of the groupthink project, the question of selling—and selling out—comes up. Under German law, owners of units in the

R50 building and other similar cohousing complexes can sell to whom they please. This, naturally, leads to some anxiety on the part of the community of owners, which only time will put to rest or realize in new, nasty neighbors. (Bridger, J. 2015) There is a lack of residents with a lower than average income and education background. Baugruppen accommodates mostly the German middleclass and is leading to increase in segregation and a rise in rents in urban areas. (University of Toronto, n.d.)

From the outside of R50, the building seems continuous and simple due to the mesh wraparound, minimizing the focus on the fact that the windows on every floor are not similar. These windows are of German manufacturers, making it possible to fully glaze the facade with very thick and insulated windows which keep the microclimate within the building at a good temperature. The use of wire mesh balconies is more affordable than reinforced concrete beams extending out, but also provides a light and airy feeling to the exterior. These materials blend in perfectly with the greenery. It is also environmentally thoughtful to not place any car parking within the building, promoting more sustainable modes of transportation.

The R50 building, although flexible in its interiors, is not as flexible in the exterior. It is a very angular structure and with its wraparound mesh balconies, cannot be extended or added onto as easily as the interior spaces which can be reconfigured. These mesh balconies are also considered communal space, and are used by any unit owner. This poses a reduction of privacy, since any member of the community walking past another member’s property can see through their living quarters. This may be solved through placing thick curtains, but the idea that someone can see through the interiors of a private space is not the most appealing. A divider per unit within the balconies could also improve this, however, by dividing these balconies, this loses its idea to become a communal balcony, and instead becomes private space for each unit owner.

The plans of each unit, although somewhat similar to the programming each unit owner and architect designed together, fell short in a way. To save on costs, most bathrooms and kitchens are located near the core of the building, altering some of the initial programming of certain units. This makes it partly similar but not fully realized.

The R50 cohousing building, even with its minor drawbacks, is a great building to reside in. Its functionality is catered specifically to its community. The collaboration between architects and owners has made the building meet the needs of its users to a level above typical developer-driven properties available on the market.

Baugruppen acts as a possibility for the upper working class to move from a rental property to acquiring their own property that they can keep and grow old in, despite the fluctuating prices of the housing market. This ensures them from being evicted or gentrified from their current location for years to come.

It is possible that the future holds multiple communal housing properties like R50 for all classes, not only the upper working class. These kinds of structures can elevate the sense of community and the idea of codependency not only in a work environment, but in a living environment as well.

The introduction of buildings like R50 in Berlin may be the solution for now, but as times change, problems and solutions evolve as well. It is not certain what lies ahead or what the Baugruppen will mature into. Looking back at the Berlin Housing timeline, it is clear that housing situations always change based on the political and economic status of Germany during a certain period of time. It is certain that the ideology and practices of R50 are not where Baugruppen and the need for cohousing ends, it will only improve over time to provide better experiences and meet the needs of Berlin residents at a higher level.

Selected Bibliography

This bibliography consists exclusively of those publications (books, articles in journals or websites) focused on the project of R50 Housing’

2018

Hartmann, T. (2018). Situative Standards. What co-housing looks like - Inside Berlin’s Radical R50 Baugruppen Project. Retrieved from https://docplayer.org/58008080-Situativestandards-what-co-housing-looks-like-inside-berlin-s-radicalr50-baugruppen-project.html

2015

Bridger, J. (2015, June 10). Don’t Call It A Commune: Inside Berlin’s Radical Housing Project. Retrieved March 6, 2022, from https://metropolismag.com/projects/dont-call-it-acommune-inside-berlin-radical-cohousing-project/

2015

R50 – Cohousing / ifau und Jesko Fezer + Heide & von Beckerath” 08 Feb 2015. ArchDaily. Accessed 6 Apr 2022. https://www.archdaily.com/593154/r50-nil-cohousing-ifauund-jesko-fezer-heide-and-von-beckerath

2011

Kuhnert, N. (Ed.). (2011, March). R50: Ifau and Jesko Fezer, Heide and Von Beckerath. ARCH+ Features. Review of R50 Cohousing by University of Toronto. (n.d.).

Daniel Sorando

Specialty Leader

Housing in Spain.

The familistic welfare regime gives housing a key role in the reproduction of its main structures (Allen et al., 2004). Promoting home ownership has been an instrument to promote the economy, rather than to reduce social inequalities. Tax relief for mortgage repayments on primary and secondary homes has been the traditional instrument of housing policy. Public spending on this policy has been applied to the detriment of public support for the working classes regardless of their tenancy.

In societies with pronounced dualism in the labour market, where the informal economy occupies an important position, owning a residence is an imperative for household social security (Castles & Ferrera, 1996). Solidarity strategies within the family are organized around the transmission of property assets across generations, legitimizing the abandonment of social housing policy.

Two types of social housing have coexisted in Spain. Most of the social housing has been the so-called Vivienda de Protección Oficial (VPO), which is destined almost entirely to homeownership and is publicly subsidized. Low-income households were systematically excluded from VPO, for which around 80% of households were eligible. The second type of social housing corresponds to its common use in the rest of Europe: rental social housing (Alberdi, 2014). From 1952, 6.8 million units have been built (27% of the total stock) and today we only have 300,000 rental social housing units.

In 2011, the distribution of tenure in Spain showed the consequences of this model. 79.6% of the population lived in their own home compared to 12.1% who did so in rental housing at market price and 2,8% in social rental housing (according to data from INE). In this context, Spain is the fourth country in the EU with the lowest percentage of rental social housing, only above Greece, Luxembourg, and Estonia (Pittini, 2019).

The deregulation of the mortgage markets during the 1980s and 1990s, in conjunction with the reduction in interest rates, allowed the expansion of the mortgage supply to sectors with less economic solvency, mainly migrants and young people.

The consequences of this model have made access to housing (both owned and rented) dramatic for some sections of society. Difficulties in accessing adequate and safe housing are, together with the low quality of employment, the main paths towards social exclusion in Spain. Social inequality is strongly linked to the Spanish residential model, due to the overburden that housing costs have on the economies of the most vulnerable households (FOESSA, 2019).

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