Friday Group: Living + Remodelling

Talk + film + discussion + interaction + food and drink

8 Nov 2024
6 pm

Bauhaus Museum Dessau

Accessibility +

Excessively high construction costs and the increase in interest rates have prevented many construction projects in recent years. In Germany, an average of 405,000 new flats have been built every year since 1950. This is no longer possible today. New building is expensive. It is often not worth it. It also harms the environment. But is it absolutely necessary to build new? Are there other ways to create affordable living space?

In addition to building new social housing, there are other ways to achieve affordable housing: Joining together and managing property collectively, whether cooperatively or in newer sociocratic organisational forms of cohabitation. The initiatives of the Mietshäuser Syndikat, which already comprises more than 160 projects, are exemplary. The aim here is to remove buildings from the real estate market in the long term, which turns housing into a product.

Another answer to the housing shortage, climate crisis and loneliness is so-called ‘housing sufficiency’. Sufficiency means that consumption remains within the limits of what is ecologically sustainable for the planet. Taking economic, social and ecological arguments together, the housing supply could be expanded – without harming the climate and with the opportunity for closeness and neighbourliness. Following on from this, the Friday group discusses the extent to which building in existing buildings or remodelling should not also be combined with new models of social responsibility.

The title: ‘Living + Rebuilding’ therefore refers not only to architectural rebuilding, but also to ‘rebuilding’ prevailing logics and thus providing new approaches and methods for creating affordable living space.

The local starting point is the ‘Sonnenhaus’, a Dessau initiative for a communal housing project in an existing building. In the discussion, we will present other current projects that have set themselves the goal of ‘housing for all’ and will engage in dialogue with the protagonists.

Admission is free.

Programme

6 pm

Welcome and moderation

Barbara Steiner, Heike Brückner

6:05 pm

Sonnenhaus

// Intro
Heike Brückner and Rosemarie Benndorf

6:25 pm

Unusual living

// Talk
On the activation of the existing building stock and its challenges, Olaf Bahner, BDA
Co-curator of the exhibition ‘Sorge um den Bestand’, which aims to sensitise people to construction in existing buildings and highlight the social and ecological benefits. How can the collective imagination be strengthened and utilised to promote climate-friendly living, especially in existing buildings? What qualities of living are required so that the ecological requirement for reduction is not seen as an obligation, but as a starting point for unusual forms of living? A plea for questioning comfort standards and for new regulations.

6:55 pm

This is our house! Appropriating spaces with the Mietshäuser Syndikat, 2016

// Film
Film excerpts, 10 min + commentary
Actors of the Mietshäuser Syndikat present models of collective appropriation of space. With a commentary by Holger Lauinger, co-author and co-producer of the film

7:15 pm

A (planning) game on the method of sociocracy

// Interactive format

7:35 pm

How do we live healthily and economically?

// Film
Film excerpts, 10 min + commentary, 10 min
With a commentary by Juliane Aleithe on mass housing construction and the housing shortage in the 1920s.

7:55 pm

Too much living space and yet no flats?

// Discussion
On social acceptance and the legal and financial structures that need to be created so that housing shortages don’t stand a chance.
Holger Lauinger, Mietshäuser Syndikat; Olaf Bahner, BDA; Jan Schaaf, Netzwerk Leipziger Freiheit

8:25 pm

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