Life in a Cooperative: An Analysis of an Architecture for Change

The City in Dispute raises a question that still resonates today: what happens when there is a housing shortage  and the market fails to respond? The exhibition documents experiments in social housing in Italy, Spain, and Portugal.

Those collective experiments were a starting point. With this event, the Basque Architecture Institute aims to open a debate on how that legacy translates into the present, in the face of a housing crisis that once again demands collective responses. To this end, it brings that same question into the present together with the Lacol cooperative and the Tenov publishing house, both of which have spent years researching this model and will present this study.

he study analyzes changes in ways of living and in architectural practice linked to cooperative housing. It focuses on four case studies —La Borda, La Balma, La Morada, and La Raval— as the evolution of a replicable model that proposes an alternative based on collective ownership and collaboration. The research combines process analysis, photographic essays, and dialogues with the communities involved.

Members of Lacol and Tenov will take part.