UNI2 COLLECTIVE HOUSING COMPLEX
Abstract
In 2025, a modest housing complex of five apartments begins on a quiet experiment. Located in a mid-sized European city, it is neither a utopia nor a spectacle, but rather the gradual unfolding of a new economic model—one where housing is no longer viewed as a commodity, but as a shared resource sustained across generations. This proposal offers a system of cohousing that varies from the utopian vision of newly built cohousing communities, with the potential for implementation in existing.
At the outset, the municipality owns the complex and all its assets — not just in name, but in bonds. Each apartment is divided into bonds, with their value proportional to the apartment’s size. The smallest unit, a one-room flat, has cheaper bonds than the four-room flats. Every month, tenants “pay rent” — not to a landlord, but into ownership. Rent is converted into bonds: each a small but meaningful step toward full tenant control. As bonds are slowly acquired, the municipality’s stake diminishes. The goal is not profit, but transition. This system is not about owning property, but about building shared responsibility and collective care. Bonds are not speculative assets — they cannot be resold or inherited. They are both a record of contribution and a mechanism for return. When someone moves out, they retain their bonds, but they no longer accumulate new ones. Instead, their existing bonds begin to transfer to the new tenant, who purchases them gradually with each month’s rent. As the outgoing tenant’s ownership decreases, their invested value is returned in real time. It’s a form of reverse amortization — slow exit rather than profit extraction.
The life of this building unfolds over seven generations, each a decade long. In 2025, the flats are occupied by diverse households: a young couple in the one-room unit; two friends cohabiting in the two-room flat; a small nuclear family in the three-room; an intergenerational household in the larger four-room unit; and a solitary older person in the remaining four-room flat. Time passes. The young couple separates, the children grow up, a group of students moves into the elderly tenant's flat after their passing, one resident loses their job and cannot pay rent for a time — but the collective agreement, revised every decade, ensures that their bond accumulation pauses without eviction. The system evolves and reshapes as personal events unfold.
Over time, the character of the building changes. Friendships form and fade. Tenants age, die, or relocate. The economic mechanism adapts not through algorithms or contracts, but through conversation. Every ten years, a new version of the building’s contract is written — a living rental agreement that responds to real, lived tensions: how to account for care work within households? Should bond distribution reflect emotional labour? What happens when someone needs to leave abruptly?
By 2085, the seventh generation lives in a building that no one owns outright — but that everyone inhabits with care. The bonds now circulate entirely within the tenant community, and the reinvestment of monthly rent supports maintenance, communal infrastructure, and new cooperative housing projects throughout the city. This shift transforms our perspective on housing, ensuring that it is secured at reasonable prices, so people no longer have to worry about having a place to live. While private housing remains an option, it is no longer the norm. City centers are now populated with cohousing communities, and individuals have the freedom to stay in their homes if they choose.
To explain the system and materialize these futures, we propose different outputs. First, a website where users can observe and explore the evolution of contracts across generations, with detailed ownership percentages, whether for an individual apartment or the entire building. Comments from a humanized building allow users to follow the storylines of different households, uncovering their conflicts and goals, as well as their struggles and successes. Secondly, a zoom-in on one of the apartments textures the emotions of its tenants where narratives are hung and collected, illustrating the dynamics of the system. Grandparents raising grandkids, kids growing, struggles with moving out and the housing crisis, loss, and departure—these are the stories of a household within the cohousing system.
This model was developed in direct response to the ongoing housing crisis and the deepening inequalities it produces. Inherited wealth has become one of the primary factors determining access to stable housing — a dynamic that entrenches privilege across generations while excluding others. By removing the profit motive and inheritance logic from the housing system, this model offers a concrete alternative: one where housing is understood not as an individual investment, but as a shared, intergenerational commitment. Its circular economy offers continuity without accumulation; security without speculation. This is a model to be scaled — not through corporate franchising, but through grassroots replication and municipal partnerships. It is not just a critique of the current system, but a living proposal for something more equitable.
