Abstract

In recent years, a multitude of projects and initiatives for communal living have emerged and the project landscape is expanding ever more dynamically. Such community housing projects make an important contribution to developing sustainable housing and living concepts in cities. They take on a pioneering role by actively participating in the design of their living environment and representing principles and values such as solidarity, democracy and sustainability in the living environment but also in the neighbourhood or district. Together with the German Institute of Urban Affairs (Difu) and the engineering office for urban and regional development Plan und Praxis, the IZT is investigating the potential of communal forms of housing for solving demographic and socio-ecological challenges and how this potential can be realised within the framework of a targeted urban development and housing policy. The practical partner is the state capital Potsdam. The project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the socio-ecological research programme. One of the tasks of the research project is to determine the social, economic and ecological effects and potentials of communal forms of housing. For this purpose, a case study analysis was carried out together with the research institute RegioKontext, in which ten exemplary community housing projects were selected and examined with regard to their effects. One of these case studies is the 4-House Project in Tübingen. In the following, the 4-House Project is presented and its social, economic and ecological effects are described. As part of the research project, a cross-evaluation of all ten case studies was also carried out (Henseling et al. 2018), which is published at https://projekt.izt.de/projekt-gemeinschaftlich-wohnen/veroeffentlichungen/.

Authors

Henseling, Christine; Krauß, Norbert; Wieland, Simon; Jänicke, Clemens; Specht, Alexandra