While studying UK student housing coops for the past three years, I came to realize the importance that international coops have for UK cooperators. This is because in North America, especially the US, and Europe, especially Germany and Switzerland, student housing coops have been around for longer and are much bigger. So this fall I am on research leave to study some of these international examples. In this post I share the experiences of visiting three European coops and attending an international conference.
Collegium Academicum (CA) in Heidelberg
The first coop we visited was the CA, which opened in early 2023. This came after students from Heidelberg University worked for 10 years to raise tens of million of Euro from various government programs, philanthropic bodies and individuals to build their own house and renovate another, providing affordable, self-managed living for alltogether 250 residents. Here is a video (in German) showing one of the co-founders explaining the origin and objectives of the project, which has been a massive but hard-won achievement that often took every bit of energy the students had.
The CA has a very interesting history as it is the successor to the original CA, which was established by the US in1945 as part of its post-war Germany re-democratization program. Aware of the role that German Universities played in support of the Nazis, the Americans wanted to create a living environment in which university students, among them many former soldiers, were to learn democratic participation, self-management and community living, including with international students, under the paternalistic tutelage of a professor and academic tutors. This paternalism created tensions with the students' desire for meaningful self-government, which came to a head in the late 1960s/early 1970s, when the university leadership decided to close the CA. In the face of strong student protests, several hundred police officers stormed the building in 1978 to evict the students and destroy all the furniture so as to prevent their return.
But the idea of democratic, self-managed and affordable student living never went away and was revived by a determined group of student activists who lived together in a rented student house in the 1980s, with support from alumni of the original CA. Following a partnership with the Miethäuser Syndikat, a German housing cooperative network that ensures that the CA house will never be privately sold, and after becoming a supported by a regional building competition, the students were giving access to land on the site of a former US-Army hospital. They then partnered with DGJ Architektur, a specialist in wooden building, to design a beautiful four-storey wooden house to the highest ecological standards.
One of the building's most innovative features are moveable internal walls that allow the students themselves to change the size of their individual rooms from 7 sq m to 14 sq m or vice versa. This varies the size of the individual and communal space inside each flat, which has 3 or 4 rooms as well as a large kitchen and common area. We learned that while residents often started with the larger room size, many converted to smaller rooms in order to maximize communal living space. Standing in the wooden spaces, which felt calm and smelled amazing, it was not hard to see why. Below are some of my photos which show a small individual room (all of the furniture was build by the students themselves in their in-house workshop), a common space and the moveable wall system.
The CA residents' vision is to enable a living environment based on participatory, consensus-oriented and transparent decision-making. Their collaborative self-management faces the challenges of high student turnover and how to motivate everybody to participate that are common to all student housing coops. Nevertheless, the entire cooperative remains entirely run by the students, who also did as much as possible of the building themselves. Besides university students, the CA is open to students in technical education and to those undertaking an orientation year after highschool, which breaks down silos. In keeping with the strong focus on sustainability, there are lots of initiatives to encourage food sharing, clothes swaps, bicycling and gardening. After visiting several of the flats, touring the building and talking to residents, we felt inspired by what the students had achieved and are able to maintain through their everyday committment to cooperative living.
La Cigüe (LC) in Geneva
Our second stop was Geneva, where we visited a number of houses belonging to the long-standing Geneva student housing cooperative La Cigüe and attended an international coop housing conference that focused on the transformative potential of student housing cooperatives across Europe. It was an intense but very informative and inspiring week.
LC also has an interesting history, with its roots in the Geneva squatting movement of the 1980s that emerged in protest against the demolition of old working-class neighborhoods in the city. Geneva is one of the most expensive places to live in Europe, making it unaffordable for many students. After a group of students occupied a university auditorium to demand better living conditions and suggested the establishment of a coop, a city councillor proposed the creation of a particular type of legal contract between a private owner of a building or flat, an intermediary and a short-term user. The main clause of the contract was that the occupants must leave the building as soon as it was being redeveloped. He encouraged the protesting students to set up an association to obtain what became known as a Contract of Trust, and so La Ciguë was born. It obtained access to its first municipal building in 1986, which the students renovated themselves, then also began renting out privately-owned properties and in 1998 constructed its first own building. It now has eight buildings, several of whom have won architectural prices for their sustainable designs.
As the coop grew, it needed to start employing professional staff to manage the several hundred rooms, which led to some challenges with its governance structures and participatory policies. There is constant experimentation with better ways of operating as LC is now home to about 800 students in a mix of own and administered buildings, at 30 - 60% below market rental rates. Residents have to be in some form of education, make below a certain amount of money and can stay for 5 years.
We visited a number of LC buildings, as well as other housing coops in the city, as part of a conference that was organized by the Pan-European Student Housing Cooperative Association (PESCHA) and hosted by urbaMonde, a network of international community-led housing initatives that celebrated its 10th anniversary, and Cooperative Housing International. Our tour started in the eco-neighbourhood of Les Vergers de Meyrin, where we visited an amazing LC property that showed us what student living could be at its sustainable and communal best. The building has some commercial spaces on the ground floor to generate income, as well as common and music spaces that residents can use for free and other neighbors can rent out. There was a communal garden, a swap shop and a children's corner as the building is also home to student families. In talking to the building's coordinator I learned about a special initiative to better welcome refugee students. There are regular meetings with the flats and for the whole building, which is represented by a number of coordinators. Here are some of my photos of a bedroom (with view of CERN), a spacious and colorful kitchen and the extra-wide external walkways that allow for mingling, gardening and storage.
We also visited a house by Equilibre, a coop that promotes eco-conscious construction and collective planning since 2005. We found out about its experiments with social architecture, co-working spaces and compostable toilets (and also learned that by law all buildings in Switzerland must still have a nuclear shelter!). Once again, the use of wood decreased the need for concrete. In the afternoon, we went on a tour of a building belonging to CODHA, which is a large housing coop established in 1994 with over 750 units. It offers a range of shared spaces including roof-top community gardens, a gym, guest rooms and a sharing space (something which all coops we saw had, allowing residents to swap items they no longer need). The most impressive feature however was a large slide that we all got to use!
The second day of the conference featured presentations, workshops and discussions among student cooperators from Switzerland, Ireland, Hungary, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and the UK, along with experts in student housing. Together with Student Coop Homes, we presented Coop Chronicles, a publication celebrating 10 years of the student housing cooperative movement in the UK. It was amazing to see so many people committed to growing student housing coops in the same room, sharing their successes but also the many challenges that stand in the way of opening more coops, including finding funding and buildings, knowledge transfer among high turnover and the perennial problem of participation.
Studentendorf Schlachtensee (SDS) in Berlin
Our final stop was Berlin where we visited the SDS, which has its origins in student mobilizations for better student accommodations in the early 1950s. Similar to the CA in Heidelberg, SDS' establishment is linked to the US-sponsored post-WWII re-education program, aiming to provide the future German elite with a political and democratic education. In Berlin, the US State Department funded the building of a student village for the Freie Universität Berlin, which was to provide a 'living democracy' experience for its student residents through its tutor program, student council and workgroups, the library and other cultural facilities, which were financed by the Ford Foundation.
This being Berlin, the Cold War was never far away, with the Free University having been established in 1948 as a counterpart to the original Berlin university, which became the Humboldt University located in East Berlin. The SDS was therefore also mandated to allow East Berlin students to experience Western-style democracy firsthand, until the wall was built in 1961. (Apparently, when students insisted on having speakers from East Germany, the Ford Foundation withdrew its funding).
As we learned during a tour of the village, this emphasis on democracy was also reflected in the village's architecture, in the style of post-war modernism which featured an administrative building with a large glass front and reflecting water pool to symbolize transparency, all rooms have the same size but slightly different features to show that every resident is equal but individual and narrow hallways to force students to interact when passing (an informative book chronicling the history of SDS states that the students were not too happy with some of the original design features, including the narrow and dark corridors).
According to SDS' website, the original student residents were less interested in self-management and political participation and more in leisure and parties, but others have shown the ongoing tensions arising from the paternalistic ideas of self-managament that gave FU leadership the last say in all decision. All that changed with the student protests in the late 1960s and 1970s. From 1971 the SDS was self-governed by the FU student union, resulting in the establishment of a still-existing student pub, but over the next 10 years it fell into disrepair because of financial shortfalls and original design defects. Therefore the Berlin government decided in 1985 to demolish and rebuild the village, which in turn started to mobilize student resistance. This included securing national heritage status for most of the village, which was granted in 2006.
The fall of the Berlin Wall put demolition plans on hold but they were revived in the late 1990s, when the Berlin government decided to sell the area, which is located in Steglitz-Zehlendorf, one of the most upscale neighborhoods of Berlin, to a private developer who planned to build luxury homes. Students again mobilized and founded a cooperative in 2002. By that time only 20 students remained living in the village, but others came in every night to protect the buildings against vandalism, with the student pub becoming the meeting place for the activists. After a long campaign that involved alliances with architects and conservation planners, sympathetic politicians and philanthropic institutions, as well as a creative and high-profile public awareness campaign, the coop managed to buy the area from the Berlin government with the help of a Swiss ethical pension fund. In 2007, an extensive renovation program began, which is now nearing its end.
We were able to see the results in the expertly restored original buildings, where attention to the original features has been combined with environmental measures such as solar panels and upgrades to accommodate contemporary student needs for more amenities.
We also talked with several of the village's managers, some of whom were actively involved in the anti-demolition movement, as well as current residents. One of the challenges facing SDS is how to generate interest in the coop among the 900 student residents, many of whom come from abroad and are not familiar with its illustrious history. An exhibition space next to the rental office definitely helps to keep it alive, as you can see in my photos below, along with the narrow corridors.
Looking back on four weeks of learning about student housing coops in Germany and Switzerland gives me hope of what is possible with the right kind of financial and political support, which is still dearly missing in the UK. Above all, meeting up with so many student cooperators in Geneva has reinforced my belief that every successful coop starts with a group of committed and hard-working students, who persist in their efforts, often for years without securing a property. Here it is solidarity from like-minded student cooperators and support from networks like PESCHA and SCH that is invaluable in sustaining the energy, together with inspiration that comes from visiting successful projects like the CA and LC. Later this month I will also be traveling to the US to attend the annual conference of NASCO, the North American student cooperation, and visiting more coops in Ann Arbour and Berkeley, so watch this space. For now, thank you for following my travels in Europe!
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