COMMONING DOMESTIC SPACE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN: THE CASE OF COHOUSING

Cohousing was born in the 1970s as a result of the post-modern cultural shift (Habraken, 1972; Turner, 1976; Harvey, 1989). Even if its origins can be traced back to the secular history of utopian communities and communitarian movements (Jarvis, 2011; Vestbro and Horelli, 2012), its current form originated in Denmark, related to the realisation of the communities Skraplanet and Sættedammen in 1972 (McCamant and Durrett, 1988). It spread in Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands first, then in English-speaking countries in the 1990s, and only from the 2000s in Southern Europe (Fromm, 1991; Gresleri, 2015; Pernilla et al., 2020). The recent expansion in Mediterranean Europe has not been studied yet: systematic research with listing and gathering data on cohousing projects is missing. What does it mean to reproduce the cohousing model in the Mediterranean context? What characteristics, procedural and typological, it has? Which contemporary issues could this housing model address? The research focuses on analysing historical and contemporary forms of shared and community living in the Mediterranean area as a vehicle for translating the cohousing models that characterise Northern Europe (Lacol, 2018). The investigation will be carried out through historical, qualitative, and comparative analysis and the re-drawing of selected case studies, with a particular emphasis on the city of Barcelona as an emblematic case of friction between community, traditional living models and internationality, housing exclusion and innovative policies.