CoHousing Inclusive; Self-Organized, Community-Led Housing for All by Michael LaFond & Larisa Tsvetkova (Eds.), 2017

"One upon a time hungry travelers arrived to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. As villagers were unwilling to share any of their food, travelers fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, place it over a fire and start to made a stone soup, which they would be delighted to share. With the need to improve the flavor they convinced villagers to bring more ingredients." 

The book CoHousing Inclusive as a metaphor for the stone soup story, which presents how to cook in five chapters, from strategies to role models and visionary participation projects, concluding with the future next steps.

Architect Alexander Hagner, resident Herbert Urschitz and former resident Hanna Schild were involved in the project VinziRast, a result of student Vienna Audimax Occupation in 2009. The jointly developed and administered Spreefeld Co-housing is economically stable and environmentally responsible urban building block of three buildings, where Christian Schöningh, Angelika Drescher, Sophie Schöffler and 137 other inhabitants live near Spree in Berlin. The Que(e)rbau Town Housing is generated as an inclusive and bottom-up development process by the residents of Vienna’s Queer Town House, where the entrance requirement is being open to queer lifestyle. 

Different forms of CoHousing dwelling are accessible and give possibility to include dwelling people with more or less money, with or without refugee experience, with or without disabilities. COHousing Inclusive discover how community housing initiatives develop diverse and sustainable neighborhoods, driven by civil society and increasingly supported by foundations, cooperatives and municipalities as well as housing companies and developers. This book is a compedium of model projects that represent a multifaceted European movement, complemented with photos and drawings. Models are more or lest developed in Austria, Switzerland and Germany so the question is how can this unconventional and promising strategies survive in the next step. The answer is obviously - Go East!

CoHousing Inclusive; Self-Organized, Community-Led Housing for All, Edited by Michael LaFond & Larisa Tsvetkova. Paperback, Text in German and English, 240 pages, 2017 Publisher Jovis