Abstract
This chapter explores how citizens self-commission high-density urban housing through a type of building cooperative coined Baugruppe in Germany. The Baugruppe model increases choice and lowers costs, fosters cohesive neighborhoods and enables adaptable, customized, living solutions for families. Owner-occupied, self-initiated projects in a self-made city successfully balance density, urbanity, social qualities, and individuality and are examples of sustainable, resilient, urban development. Whereas there is no typical model, common strategies and legal forms are demonstrated in hundreds of newer examples. The German Baugruppe has a long tradition and, throughout Europe, cities are adapting policies to facilitate alternative development models. Ultimately, self-made projects have the potential to increase the quality, affordability, and viability of urban living while contributing to the sustainability of the city.
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Notes
- 1.
Kristien Ring, AA PROJECTS (ed.) in collaboration with the Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment of Berlin, SELF MADE CITY. Berlin: Self-initiated Urban Living and Architectural Interventions, Jovis Publishers, 2013. The publication Self Made City, is a quantitative and qualitative analysis of over 125 projects from Berlin, Germany that serves as a basis of this text, in addition to further research including over fifty lectures, workshops, and conferences, attended by the author in cities worldwide between 2013 and 2017.
- 2.
In Berlin, on average, 48% of the people living in Baugruppe projects (constructed between 2004 and 2013) are families with children, as compared to only 6.4% of families living in apartments in the city as a whole.
- 3.
Accompanying the Urban Living exhibition at the DAZ German Architecture Center in Berlin in June 2015, a series of discussions looked at these themes. For more information, see http://aa-projects.eu/de/urban-living-y-table-talks-at-the-dazurban-living-y-table-talks-at-the-daz/.
- 4.
Developers are responding to the self-made trend. The Nightingale model from Australia is a fixed-profit, ecological, developer: http://nightingalehousing.org. In Switzerland, the Stiftung Edith Maryon develops group housing: http://www.maryon.ch.
- 5.
This necessitates that all members use the same bank. In urban environments, the cost of land usually makes up around 20–30% of the cost of the project.
- 6.
For more information on Australian Baugruppen, see https://baugruppen.com.au/index.html and https://www.landcorp.com.au/Our-Work/Innovation-Through-Demonstration/Baugruppen/.
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Ring, K. (2019). The Self-Made City—Urban Living and Alternative Development Models. In: Arefi, M., Kickert, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Bottom-Up Urbanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90131-2_9
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