‘Doing together what can be done together’

The interrupted history of co-housing in the Netherlands

Abstract

Centraal Wonen was a form of co-housing that arose in the Netherlands in the 1970s. It involved several households sharing a variety of communal amenities within the same residential development. The housing complexes were intended to accommodate a diverse group of residents of up to 250 individuals and were usually designed in consultation with the prospective residents. The initiators of Centraal Wonen believed that this type of living arrangement offered a solution to various social issues, including the inferior status of women, increasing loneliness and a housing stock biased in favour of single-family houses and apartments. The alternative to Centraal Wonen were residential developments in which a fine-grained mix of dwellings and communal amenities created the conditions for the spontaneous emergence of a tight-knit community. It is estimated that between 1977 and 1991 over sixty Centraal Wonen projects were built, after which co-housing faded into oblivion.
Centraal Wonen emerged at a hinge point between two eras, and this is reflected in both the concept and its manifestation. The ideological underpinning was perfectly in tune with the emancipatory and socio-critical movements of the early 1970s, whereas the majority of the projects were not built until the more pragmatic1980s. Centraal Wonen included elements of both eras: ‘doing together what can be done together’, but not at the expense of the individual’s independence. The very first project, the Wandelmeent, was exemplary of the small-scale movement whose adherents strove to capture the essence of a recognizable and homely living environment with a varied streetscape. The vast majority of projects were built in the 1980s, by which time the architectural expression was starting to look a bit lacklustre. Moreover, the design of Centraal Wonen projects was based more on architectural trends and the architect’s choices and less on the results of consultation and communality.
The real inventiveness and quality of Centraal Wonen lay not in individual components, such as the consultation process, the design and the floor plan, but in uniting concern for all those components within a single project, guided by a shared vision of how to live.
Although Centraal Wonen proved to be relatively short-lived, communal and alternative forms of living have once again been attracting keen interest in recent years. It seems that the motto ‘do together what can be done together’ resonates in today’s world. The Centraal Wonen projects constitute a valuable source for new communal housing projects and as such should not be forgotten.