Contemporary Anti-Urbanism

Helmond near Breda, Mill’O in Geneva suburbs, Munksogard in Copenhagen, Rio Cohousing in Stockholm, the many forms of shared living scattered in Berlin. It’s not difficult to add other places where people live mostly in alternative ways to those of property and renting. It’s the case of small groups of people that it’s difficult to understand how they can live by cultivating land contamined by previous uses. These are some of the ways in which the European co-housing has evolved. It is composed of famous and several other places: Wandelmeent in Amsterdam (the first settlement built in the Netherlands in 1977 with now more than 200 people) and, in a kind of contest to gigantism that paradoxically emulates places for mass tourism reception, Aardrjik in the Netherlands (equipped dining rooms, gyms, bars, disco and yoga room, spaces to rent), new neighborhoods models as Trudheslund in Copenhagen (33 families) or Stoplyckan in Sweden (more than 400 people and 180 apartments). It’s a range of different situations, contexts and projects, that discourages any consideration about the whole phenomenon, even if it sets some cross-cutting issues.

What holds together such different places is a game against the city. The protagonists are usually families with small children and elderly, middle-class people with some financial as well as cultural resources, actors who are concerned about social justice and equity. In these communities, people can feel out of a society that is perceived as unfair.
The documentary by Nicolas Vernier and Igor Loup about the Association Mill’o (Je partecipe, tu partecipes, il-elle partecipes, nous coopérons, 2009-2010) is emblematic for how it is constantly repeating the richness of living in another way: feeling a monad against the society. An inhabitant of the Danish community of Dreierbanken, interviewed for another documentary (Voices of Cohousing, by Matthieu Lietaert, 2012), strengthens the same attitude talking about decisions that are not governed by political or economic plans, but by “the idea that rich and poor can live together.”

It is paradoxical: some space-like enclaves, in which a few rich people close themselves up (a bit everywhere in the world), pretend to contain both “the rich and the poor”. It is a seemingly archaic form of settlement that wants to become an opportunity to experience new forms of solidarity and protection. The entre-soi is the expression of concerns about identity that are increasingly difficult to fulfill in a pluralistic and changing society.
But it’s also a means to build trust and manage everyday life risks. With some benefits: inhabitants can have more space than in a traditional apartment, they can have more people around than in the traditional family, they can have more time. The finding is a lot of work and a sort of continuous excitement. It is an extreme form of “solitude overcoming”, accompanied by an excess of communication and promotion on the web. There is little new in these experiments, even if they are advertised as a new way of vivre ensemble. They are sort of micro social laboratories where we can observe, in vitro, the functioning of the decision-making and the conflict-managing between people who decided to live together. Here, the choice between «coopérer» and «faire il cavalier seul» is a not too different version of the prisoner’s dilemma. But the questions that these laboratories pose about space are not irrelevant.

It is useful to place these experiences within the Anti-Urbanism tradition? In the early Sixties, Robert Glass said that Urbanism was the field of all the Anti-Urbanists “who try to shape the city in terms of rural idealized images.” A paradox. Glass had in mind the Anglo-Saxon tradition and there is no doubt that Owen, Silk Buckingham, Minter Morgan, Solly Morris and Howard had felt the threat of the city. Perhaps Urbanism was not only the field of Anti-Urbanists, but surely city rejection produced, throughout the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, important experiments in both spatial and social policy. Founders of model communities, inspirers of reform movements and urban planners found themselves united here. Can the contemporary Anti-Urbanism (the one of the co-housing communities) do the same? Are there any relevant spatial innovations? This is a field of research that deserves to be explored. Looking at the buildings it’s difficult to capture any innovative gap. The emphasis on ecological aspects leads to the use of natural materials and appropriate technologies, but space is generally not very innovative: row houses or, more often, multi-storey buildings with large common areas and big balconies that serve as diaphragms for negotiating the being alone and the being with others. Buildings are conceived as energy-producing machines that try to be self-sufficient (although they often enjoy substantial public funding).
All the innovative effort seems to be in the process (ie in the forms of institutionalization and promotion). But maybe it’s wrong to seek a gap in spatial aspects looking so close to the specific cases. Perhaps more interesting is to understand which are the territories that contribute to reshape these new enclaves, protected more by ideology than by security systems. Where are they located? Helmond is located in a desolate de-industrialized area. Mill’O in the more or less ordinary Geneva suburbs. Other places are located on agricultural lands that have lost their value or the possibility to produce it. Their recurrence in a single stroke shatters many rhetorics of the recent years discourse on the city: the return of the neighborhood, the value of proximity, the sprawl, the happiness of living every man for himself. The territory that is drawn from these new «secessionist» attitudes is far from the functionalist imperatives, as it is far from those of sprawl. It is rather the outcome of new colonizations of bad lands. Thus, recovery, redemption and recycling become the central issues also in the sharing practices, contribuing to reshape the change of values that European society attributes to dwelling.

Cristina Bianchetti, Angelo Sampieri


• These short considerations are born within a collective research conducted by a couple of years on the issues of sharing in the contemporary city. Or, to put it otherwise, on the spatial implications of the increasing of social ties (even if episodic and temporary) within a society that remains hard individualized. This research investigates different forms of sharing: shared living, shared social enterprise, shared services in times of crisis. It refers to a highly explored phenomenology which usually emphasizes the need (but also the morality) to live cheaply, without market and institutions, with others and for others. The hypotheses, the first explorations and the results of this research that tries to observe critically the sharing’s spatial implications are on the blog: www.territoridellacondivisione.wordpress.com

Cristina Bianchetti
Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning
Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy
E-mail: cristina.bianchetti@polito.it
Angelo Sampieri
Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning
Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy
E-mail: angelo.sampieri@polito.it