Between the democratization of housing and the neoliberal responsibilization of citizens: The proliferation of co-housing in Viennese city planning

Abstract

In contemporary city planning, self-organized collaborative forms of housing are flourishing. However, in the literature, the increasing incorporation of citizens in housing and planning has been interpreted in very different ways. The research on urban planning has understood the proliferation of co-housing groups as indicating changing participatory demands of citizens on one hand, and as an effort to organize social change on an everyday level on the other. In contrast, critical social researchers have interpreted the rise of collaborative housing not as a democratization, but as a shift of urban governance towards the responsibilization of citizens. In this article, we use these two theoretical perspectives for making sense of the political values that are present in the contemporary proliferation of co-housing groups in Viennese urban planning. The empirical base of our endeavor is a series of qualitative interviews with different stakeholders (city planners, administrators, architects, developers, and neighbors) and members of co-housing groups in the city development area Wildgarten in the South of the city. We conclude that in the Wildgarten, the self-empowerment of citizens goes hand-in-hand with an increasing top-down steering by a neoliberal entrepreneurial city. Furthermore, we found that the co-housing groups tend to willingly accept the hierarchy between planning bodies and themselves, which contradicts the political marketing strategies of social transformation and democratization attached to Wildgarten. Simultaneously, possibly as a consequence from top-down citizen responsibilization, our findings show that co-housing groups often focus more on a democratized group interior than on transforming society at large.