Shelter for Daydreams; Homes for People Not Profit

How do we want to live? What kind of place do we need to live and work? What are alternatives to the dominant forms of ownership and the market-driven housing policy at a time when space is becoming increasingly scarce and expensive, and citizens are being pushed out of their homes? Previous explorations into Swiss housing cooperatives as a form of living and working together (‘FGA# 38 What Life Could Be’, (2019)) inspired these conversations and excursions in and around their home city of Rotterdam, where, despite the current 2015 Housing Act and the Rotterdam Cooperative Housing Action Plan of 2019, collective and self-organised forms of housing are not gaining ground. FGA draws links between current resistance and activism against the current housing policies in Nederland, to succesfull actions in the ‘70 en ‘80. What can the role of artists and architects be in this? How to realise “a wide range of spatial quality” and “joyful-dwelling associations”?