Communal living – forget stereotypes, it could solve the UK's housing crisis

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/30/communal-living-answer-uk-housing-crisis

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Communes are not, as a rule, taken particularly seriously as possible living arrangements for the majority of the population. For some reason, it is still considered common sense for housing, irrespective of its quality, to be as private as possible. Even when you subtract the more recent extraneous additions to our living spaces – the driveways, the hedges, the gates, the CCTV, the private security force – we have living arrangements that practically build in insularity.

In Britain, the average new block of one- or two-bedroom flats or close of executive family homes both market themselves on comfort and conservatism, but both, paradoxically, make a comfortable life difficult – with minimal space standards, windowless kitchens, cavity walls. At the same time, there is the assumption that each individual unit, no matter how shoddy, is inviolable. But in practice, especially in larger cities, housing is collective by accident.

It's not just students – the housing crisis is pushing people into flatsharing into their 30s and beyond. But luxury flats rented to groups of aspirant junior clerks or sold-off council housing and private rented accommodation subdivided into multiple profitably lettable units both ensure that basic facilities – such as toilets and kitchens – have to be shared, without the space or the design being prepared for that. Could collective housing, where the sharing of communal spaces is assumed from the outset, be the answer?

Berlin's Lebensort Vielfalt (Diverse Living Space) is the kind of housing project that no developer or municipality in the UK would consider for a split second. An LGBT housing scheme, with 60% allocated to older tenants, it's the kind of quietly successful project that undemonstratively shows other ways of living are possible.

Collective housing is not a suggestion likely to endear itself to the current government, now busying itself in removing building regulations in an increasingly desperate attempt to get the buy-to-let flats and noddy houses going up again. It runs contrary to the rightwing determinist urban planning orthodoxy of the last 25 years, where private and "defensible space" is considered a guarantor against crime.

Meanwhile, squats, long the major laboratory of experiments in group living, are being criminalised, not coincidentally at the time when they're most needed. Squatting is usually – and especially now – a response to emergency, a matter of improvisation, taking somewhere dilapidated, removing the trees growing into the floorboards and getting electricity and drainage working. Like all experiments of this kind, squats can find themselves making a virtue of necessity. This wouldn't be the case if collective housing was planned and designed.

Few countries have ever taken this seriously as an aim. In one of the few that did, the early USSR, there was a distinction between the "kommunalka" and the "dom kommuny", in the usual Soviet fashion of making a divide between how things are and how they will be. Kommunalkas were, and in many Russian cities still are, the norm – tenements inherited from tsarism ineptly bisected by curtains, in their most common form, with little in the way of genuinely communal facilities. Dom kommuny were purpose-built, with enough living space for each tenant, with social life specially provided for in built-in canteens, libraries and parks. Only a handful were ever built. The average squat, like the average shared house, is a variant of kommunalka. Lebensort Vielfalt is surely a dom kommuny – with its concierge, restaurant, library and bar, it is a very well-appointed version of collective living; suggesting it might, in fact, be a more enjoyable and comfortable form of housing than private.

Yet to the communal hardliner the dom kommuny is a falling back from true collectivism – it assumes the division of labour, and that someone else will be making your tea. Perhaps that they will do so for a living. In a society where most still work long hours, though, it has the benefit of being, in the parlance, a transitional form of housing, with no need for elective heroics on the part of its tenants.

Like another recent Berlin experiment – the OAPs squatting their local community centre in Pankow – it shows that collective living no longer needs to be attached to a "lifestyle" or an easily parodied stereotype. As the crisis of private housing rages, it looks increasingly sensible.