Cooperativa de vivienda La Borda, Barcelona, 2014-2018 © IMHAB

The cooperative that calls itself Lacol came into being in 2009 as an initiative of young architects and students averse as much to the usual logic of hierarchical study programs as to professional exploitation. It was also a bit more than ten years ago that a new generation of lease-based housing cooperatives began to crop up, a movement which in Barcelona consolidated with Ada Colau’s rise to mayorship in 2015, the year City Hall set up the Housing Cooperative Board to articulate and strengthen demand.

In this process it was vital that La Borda, a project of Lacol, come to fruition. What the building’s inauguration in December 2018 demonstrated was that housing cooperatives based on 90-year leases of public land were possible, transcending the dichotomy between public and private as well as between owning and renting. To implement these experiments from the angle of private initiative, where public programs had no access, in 2016 the non-profit foundation La Dinamo was created. The sector of housing cooperatives reemerged and reactivated, and now there are already twenty or so in Barcelona and as many elsewhere in Catalonia. The key was to have a housing stock that would be unaffected by market fluctuations and interests...[+]