Commitment ‒ city ‒ self. Ethical self-formations in Munich’s young housing cooperatives.

Abstract

Young housing cooperatives in the German city of Munich create commonly owned buildings and follow specific ideals of urban society. They promote an alternative to the financialization of housing space and aim at improving everyday urban life, especially regarding neighborhood community and architecture. Therefore, they present arenas for urban–ethical subjectivations. Even though media and political debates often ascribe cooperatives high potentials, the initiatives are discussed controversially. While supporters celebrate them as examples of citizens’ self-organized realization of ideals of economic and social change, critics suspect that cooperatives are merely models of self-help through which privileged residents secure their own housing situation and decorate it with rhetoric about values and ethics. Based on ethnographic research, this chapter questions such interpretations of young housing cooperatives as either emancipative projects that change housing economy or distinction-oriented projects that reproduce social hierarchies. Housing cooperatives, understood as ethical projects, negotiate norms and ideals about how to live in a city. This entails motivations to secure one’s own position as much as imaginations about what the future of Munich could or should generally look like. Self-help, therefore, is a constitutive part of ethical reflections and ambitions.