Association for Accessibility in Art, in Everyday Life, in Minds: Intersectional City House (2016)[1]

The name of the Intersectional City House is programmatic. As a project, building and form of living together, it is situated close to the translations between the ways in which LGBTQ+ people and people of colour, wheelchair users, single parents and people with migration experience, are each confronted with inequality and discrimination in the power formations of the majority society. As an architect I was honoured to work on the Intersektionales Stadthaus (Intersectional City House) in Vienna's 16th district for and with the Association for Accessibility in Art, in Everyday Life, in Minds.

The Intersectional City House is designed for the living together, doing together and being together of people from different marginalised groups, for their conflictual self-determination.[2] Here, the intersectional also found a spatial-formal expression through the vertical section of the house: the living together of the residential community is not organised within one level, but sectionally ('in section'): across all its floors the house is one shared living space for the community, with an elevator in the centre and consistently shared infrastructure (bathrooms, toilets and especially the one kitchen on the Ground Floor). There are no individual apartments in the Intersectional City House; however, the latter is not an ideological dogma here (quasi against privacy per se) - rather: it should also be possible to access privacy without barriers, which is why, in addition to the shared spaces, all private rooms are also accessible without barriers. It was important for the self-determined concept of the residents that the form of living is not tailored to the norm identity of the bourgeois nuclear family.

Thus, the Intersectional City House is also part of a historical tradition of democratising architecture: Both the Viennese Einküchenhaus and the Viennese Settlers' Movement of the 1920s are worth mentioning here. In contrast to the housing projects of the settlers of that time, however, the Intersectional City House is not located on a greenfield site but in a dense urban network. And in contrast to profit-oriented investment processes, the previously existing house was not demolished, but rebuilt and put to new use.

What the residents of the Intersectional City House have in common with the settlers' movement is that they make their claim to self-determined living possible, even though they have little money, not least through self-construction. And that, in turn, is not only an organisational solution to a problem, but a demand in a political sense: namely, to claim the right to build themselves, even though the 'assets' to do so – in the capitalist sense as well as in the physical or expert-cratic sense – are not available.

Of course, the 'money question' remains present, but it is met here in the form of a solidarity economy in which the housing collective is oriented towards the 'weakest' person in the group: This is meant in the sense of different needs, all of which should be brought to bear, as well as in the sense of financial weakness. Any member's contribution to the building costs and to the total rent is as much as they can (just) afford. Universal access, accessibility, is therefore not only to be understood as the removal of physical barriers in the house, but as the guiding principle of the house. Forms of financing pragmatic economies are combined with political claims and forms of solidary communalisation.

The political moment of the Intersectional City House is related to the program of the Care Revolution, through which the domestic labour of reproduction, care, and nursing, that is, also the labour of housing, defines itself as a political force with demands, as the classical proletarian movements did on the basis of production-industry labour as an exemplary form of labour.

My role as an architect in the process consisted in making possible what did not seem to be easily possible for the group: namely, to turn an existing apartment house into a house with only one kitchen for themselves with little means – but in a self-determined way. At the same time, this was accompanied by the self-retraction of my role as a 'classical' architect in the narrow sense of 'aesthetics' (in terms of stylistic trademarks, one's own 'language of form', etc.). The core architectural questions were: What do people need me for, what don't they need me for to create their infrastructure for intersectional solidarity?

** SchloR: habiTAT (Mietshäusersyndikat)

SchloR is part of the Austrian collective solidarity association habiTAT, which is building a network of non-profit, self-initiated and self-managed houses. This process is slow and difficult due to the real estate and land market, and so far only a few projects have been successful. However, they are crucial to the beginning and continuation of the process.

Named habiTAT, the Austrian association is a formation modelled according to the German Mietshäusersyndikat (tenement house syndicate), which has been growing since 1983. Both the German and the Austrian syndicate structure are associations of solidarity, which promote self-organised affordable living and working spaces. Essential here is their aim to de-capitalise residential space through the active removal of land and houses from the free speculative market. The structure of the association guarantees the permanent commitment of its sub-associations to the strict self-commitment to non-capitalisation of the living space (and in some cases also working space) that has been created and is still to be created.

The political dimension of this economic project in a narrower sense can be seen in the polemical name of SchloR, one of habiTAT's sub-associations, founded in Vienna in 2017. Their name SchloR is an abbreviation for Schöner Leben ohne Raiffeisen, meaning 'Live more beautifully without Raiffeisen'. Raiffeisen is a global financial service provider, as banks like to call themselves these days, and SchloR is a collective-economic project for the collaborative, non-profit-oriented planning, financing, construction, and use of residential and workshop/studio workspace. It is, as its name implies, firmly opposed to the rent-profit or big-bank economy. This 'being-against' integrates the varied claims for use and positions within the construction group, and constitutes it as a political subject of action in struggles for power and distribution of urban space. The growing number of houses, which are part of the syndicate, or more specifically their tenants, agree to veto each other against any speculation and support new projects.

To put it briefly: syndicates like habiTAT pose the question of power. The particular demand of self-organised housing is charged and linked beyond this niche character and beyond the characteristic of a technical solution for a social problem: charged with the – politically indispensable – pathos of an overarching vision linked with other democratic demands to popular-political chains of equivalence. Beyond demands that belong to the protection of tenants in the narrower sense – the end of fixed-term rental contracts, generally affordable housing – and contrary to the entrepreneurial ideological vision of a 'free rental market' for all 'high achievers' who can afford it, habiTAT projects also apply to the testing of new forms of designing and living in housing.

The radical-democratic question of how to live together in solidarity without exploitation and exclusion has one starting point in housing, but also in the moment where groups like SchloR join other protests on the streets relating to class, race and gender injustice, in solidarity for demands other than their own, to open up to the creation of spaces as infrastructure for movements, as well as spaces open for neighbourhood use.