Collective Thresholds
An Atlas of Cohousing Typologies
A study investigating community living across typologies and scales in Europe and applying lessons learnt to Vancouver.
Role:
Duration:
Tools:
Principal Investigator
8 Weeks
Figma, Adobe AI, PS
Introduction
Housing is often understood through the boundary of the individual home or dwelling unit: the apartment, the house, or the room as a clearly defined private space. Cohousing complicates this boundary. Activities conventionally contained within the home—cooking, eating, gathering, working, caring, playing, and living—can be redistributed across a wider field of shared spaces. As a result, the domestic environment is no longer limited to the private unit but extends into corridors, kitchens, gardens, common rooms, courtyards, workshops, and other collective spaces.
This directed study examines how different cohousing communities spatially organize this relationship between individual and collective life. Rather than treating cohousing as a single architectural typology, the study approaches it as a spectrum of spatial models shaped by different cultural, social, economic, and governance structures.
The research is grounded in fieldwork conducted across Europe and focuses primarily on four precedents: Lange Eng in Denmark, Blau Insel in Berlin, Multigenerationenhaus Hollandgarten in Vienna, and Sargfabrik in Vienna. Each represents a different approach to collective living, from the organization of shared domestic facilities to the governance structures that sustain the community over time.
The study combines spatial observation with conversations with residents. Architectural drawings can describe how a project was intended to function, but they cannot fully explain how collective life develops after occupation. Resident interviews therefore form an important parallel layer of the research, revealing how communities were founded, how decisions are made, which spaces are most actively used and how spaces have changed over time.
Rather than producing comprehensive architectural documentation of each project, this atlas deliberately uses diagrams and quotes from interviews. Buildings are simplified to show relationships, sequences, and adjacencies that can be compared across projects. The aim is not to reproduce the architecture in its entirety, but to isolate the spatial mechanisms that make collective living possible and unique
Attention is given to the spaces that exist between clearly private and clearly public domains. Corridors, galleries, shared entrances, courtyards, gardens, stairs, terraces, and common rooms operate as liminal spaces: spaces in which residents can encounter one another without necessarily committing to formal social interaction. These thresholds provide both connection and distance, allowing residents to negotiate how much or how little they participate in collective life.
The study therefore asks not simply what spaces are shared, but how is sharing structured. Which domestic functions remain private? Which become collective? Where do residents encounter one another during everyday routines? How are opportunities for interaction balanced with privacy? And, how do governance structures support commmunity?
By comparing these relationships across several projects, the study seeks to identify recurring strategies rather than a singular model of successful cohousing. The intention is to develop a catalogue of spatial and organizational principles that can inform future investigations into collective domesticity at a much smaller scale, including the possibility of cohousing within the constraints of a typical Vancouver residential lot but duplicated across the city to create a mesh and a grid.
Analytical Framework
The precedents are analyzed through a consistent set of diagrammatic lenses. Each isolate one aspect of collective living so that relationships can be compared across projects despite differences in scale, context, and architectural form.
01 Public, Collective, Liminal, Private Spaces
The first layer examines the gradient between public and private space.
Rather than treating these conditions as binary, spaces are categorized according to degrees of access and intimacy:
Public:
Spaces accessible to the wider city or neighbourhood.
Collective:
Spaces shared intentionally by the residential community.
Liminal:
Transitional or ambiguous spaces that mediate between collective and private domains.
Private:
Spaces primarily controlled by an individual or household.
The analysis focuses on how residents move through these layers and on the spatial thickness of the transition between communal and individual life.
02 Distribution of Domestic Life
02 Distribution of Domestic Life
Domestic Activities are defined as activities typically undertaken within a private home. These can include cooking, dining, laundry, childcare, work, leisure, gardening, hosting, and storage.
Spaces are analyzed according to whether they occur within a private home, collective space, or through a hybrid arrangement.
These analysis will reveal how much of the conventional home is redistributed into collective space and where each project postitions the boundary between individual and shared domestic space.
03 Encounter
Collective living is not just reliant on a dedicated common room or amenity space. Everyday encounters can also emerge through circulation and routine.
They can be distinguished into:
Intentional encounters:
Residents deliberately choosing to participate in communal activities
Incidental encounters:
Unplanned interactions occurring through shared circulation or proximity.
Routine encounters:
Interactions generated through routine domestic activities such as collecting mail, doing laundry, cooking, and gardening.
Analyzing these encounters can identify how spaces form different interactions and how design can create opportunities for social contact without making participation compulsory. Further, analyzing encounters can also help to evaluate the effectiveness of shared spaces and how they are used
04 Governance
Collective housing is spatial and organizational model. Analyzing the governance structure of different precedents helps to reveal how different models lead to different community housing projects.
Questions investigated include:
Who initiated the project and how is the property owned?
How are community spaces managed and decisions made?
What responsibilities are expected of residents and how are conflicts addressed?
These relationships diagrammed help to understand how collective space is supported by collective decision making.
The Case Studies
At a glance:
Comparing Governance
Space and Domesticity
Implications for Vancouver
From Collective Housing Precedents to Small-Scale Domesticitiy
The four case studies demonstrate that community housing is not defined by a singular architectural type. Lange Eng, Blaue Insel, Generationenhaus Holländergarten, and Sargfabrik differ substantially in scale, ownership, governance, spatial organization, and expectations of communal participation. What connects them is not a particular building form, but the deliberate negotiation of the boundary between individual and collective life.
This distinction is particularly important when considering the transfer of European cohousing principles to Vancouver. The physical forms of these projects cannot simply be reproduced on a typical Vancouver residential lot. Their courtyards, large common houses, extensive shared facilities, and institutional structures are often made possible by larger sites, different land-tenure systems, cooperative financing, and regulatory environments. Their value as precedents therefore lies less in their physical replication than in the relationships they establish between privacy, sharing, encounter, governance, and everyday domestic life.
Sharing Does Not Require the Elimination of Privacy
Across the precedents, collective living is most successful when sharing exists alongside clearly protected private space. Cohousing does not require every domestic activity to become communal. Instead, residents retain an individual domestic territory while selectively extending particular functions into the collective realm.
This suggests that a Vancouver model should not begin by asking how much private space can be removed. A more productive question is which domestic functions become more valuable when they are shared. Laundry, guest accommodation, workshops, gardens, dining spaces, and occasional communal cooking can provide opportunities for interaction while reducing unnecessary duplication. Bedrooms, bathrooms, and spaces of retreat remain important precisely because participation in collective life must be voluntary.
The relationship can therefore be understood as a gradient rather than a binary:
private → liminal → collective
The quality of cohousing emerges in how carefully that gradient is constructed.
Liminal Space As Social Infrastructure
The comparative study reveals the significance of spaces that are neither clearly private nor fully communal. Galleries, entrance zones, circulation routes, gardens, terraces, courtyards, and widened thresholds allow residents to encounter one another without requiring organized social activity. These spaces are important because they support incidental interaction.
A common room may host a scheduled meeting or dinner, but a shared path, stair, garden edge, or entrance allows someone to briefly greet a neighbour and continue home. These small social encounters accumulate and help establish familiarity without demanding constant participation. In the case of Blau Insel, the wide open-air circulation corridors also serve as a shared front patios where neighbors can have casual encounters but also choose intentional encounters like pulling up a table and sharing a meal.
For a small Vancouver project, where there may be insufficient space for a large dedicated common house, this suggests that circulation itself can become part of the collective infrastructure. A shared stair, courtyard, exterior gallery, front porch, or garden path can perform multiple roles simultaneously. Instead of treating circulation as leftover space, it can become one of the principal sites of community formation.
Further, the precedents suggest that the most socially productive spaces are often associated with ordinary routines rather than exceptional events. Cooking, eating, doing laundry, collecting mail, gardening, entering the building, taking out waste, or watching children are activities that residents perform repeatedly. When selected everyday activities overlap spatially, they generate opportunities for residents to see and interact with one another as part of normal domestic life.
This is fundamentally different from providing a multipurpose amenity room that residents must consciously decide to visit. For Vancouver, collective space should therefore be positioned along daily paths rather than separated as an optional destination. The question becomes: "Where can an activity residents already need to perform become an opportunity for encounter?" This approach allows relatively small shared spaces to have a disproportionately large social effect.
Governance Is Part of the Architecture
One of the clearest lessons from the interviews and comparative study is that shared space alone does not create community. Every communal kitchen, garden, workshop, guest room, courtyard, or multifunctional space raises organizational questions:
Who maintains it?
Who decides how it is used?
Who pays for it?
Who can change it?
What happens when residents disagree?
The different ownership and governance structures of the four precedents demonstrate that collective space requires a corresponding social structure capable of maintaining it. This has direct implications for architectural design. A project with extensive communal facilities demands more collective decision-making and maintenance than one based primarily on shared circulation and a small number of common spaces.
In the case of Lange Eng, community engagement was a key founding principle of the community. As such, the level of community engagement is high with all residents participating in community meals six days a week. Residents also commit to two "fix-it days" a year where everyone comes down to provide maintenance for the community. All residents also participate in active governance committees and twice annually, residents come together for general assemblies to decide on problems.
By contrast, a community like Generationerhaus Hollandergarten is more moderately engaged where governance is provided jointly by the developer and residents and community members are more focused on the socials and daily life aspects of governance.
For a Vancouver project, governance therefore needs to be considered alongside spatial design from the beginning. The amount of sharing should correspond to the community's capacity and willingness to govern that sharing.
Application to a Vancouver Single-Family Lot
The principal lesson of these case studies is not that Vancouver requires a smaller version of Lange Eng, Blaue Insel, Holländergarten, or Sargfabrik. Instead, each project contributes a set of transferable relationships.
From Lange Eng comes the potential of everyday ritual and repeated communal activity. From Blaue Insel comes an understanding of collective ownership and resident agency operating within dense urban housing. From Generationenhaus Holländergarten comes the possibility of multigenerational living organized around shared but protected collective space. From Sargfabrik comes an expanded understanding of the domestic realm, where facilities and programs normally considered external to housing can become part of collective everyday life.
On a Vancouver residential lot, these lessons must operate at a much smaller scale. A project may contain only a handful of households rather than dozens or hundreds of residents. The objective should therefore not be to maximize the amount of communal space, but to identify the minimum spatial interventions capable of producing meaningful forms of collectivity. A shared stair may matter more than a large common hall.
A table shared by six households may matter more than a commercial-sized communal kitchen. A garden threshold may matter more than an internal corridor. A guest room may allow individual units to become smaller without reducing residents' ability to host family and friends.
The challenge becomes one of selective sharing. What spaces can be shared? What spaces can remain private?
Towards a Decentralized, Small-Scale Collective Domesticity
The case studies ultimately suggest that cohousing should be understood not as a series of building typologies but as a system of relationships.
For Vancouver, these relationships ultimately distill down into several core principles.
01
Preserve a clear private domain
03
Create thick thresholds between private and collective space.
05
Design circulation to serve as social infrastructure
07
Match the amount of shared space to the capacity for collective governance
09
Allow residents to appropriate and change spaces over time
02
Share domestic functions selectively rather than universally
04
Place shared programs along everyday paths
06
Provide multiple degrees of participation and withdrawl
08
Design circulation to serve as social infrastructure
10
Allow conditions for community rather than attempting to prescribe community itself