The wohnbund, founded in 1983, is an association promoting cooperative and collaborative housing throughout Germany. With around 150 members (individuals and organizations) we are a diverse network of experts and practitioners – urban planners and social scientists, architecture firms and project consultants, housing cooperatives, and individual co-housing projects.

We facilitate knowledge-exchange through annual conferences, regular working group meetings, and publications on topics such as organizational and financial strategies for housing cooperatives, or the challenges that housing construction and renovation projects face due to ecological, demographic, and economic change. We advocate for the potential of secure housing provision through small and medium cooperatives with strong democratic members’ participation as a sustainable and just alternative to the for-profit rental and individual ownership market.

We welcome the sustained interesest in our approaches from experts and activists from around the world which we have noticed in recent years. We are happy to communicate in English and open to transnational collaborations – please get in touch (see contact). Some short English-language texts on aspects of cooperative housing in Germany by our executive director Tobias Bernet (and co-authors) can be found here (open access), here (within PDF), and here.