Architect Rodrigo Rieiro Díaz, writing for the Collective ARKRIT, explores the values of community living in Stacken, a cohousing project built in Sweden in 1979. The project became the country's first housing model based on self-management, community labor, and feminism, challenging established social relations and presenting collective living as an attempt to move beyond the standard family model.
Stacken is an apartment building in Bergsjön, a suburb on the outskirts of Gothenburg, Sweden. Its name refers to the mound of earth that ant colonies build for their nests. In 1979, Stacken became the first cohousing (kollektivhus) project of its kind in the country. However, the kollektivhus concept had already emerged in Sweden in the 1930s with residences like the housing building on John Ericssonsgatan in Stockholm, designed by architect Sven Markelius and social democratic sociologist and politician Alva Myrdal. This housing typology was designed to reduce domestic labor for upper-class women—a functionalist response both to the entry of many of these women into the labor market and to the rising cost of domestic service. It belonged to the rationalist tradition of collective housing integrated with shared facilities and hired staff, similar to central-kitchen housing in Northern and Central Europe, American apartment hotels, or collective housing experiments like Narkomfin in the Soviet Union.
The kollektivhus concept was redefined a few decades later. In the wake of the social and political movements of the late 1960s, some young people in Swedish cities began living in communes (kollektiv). This questioning of established social relations and the turn toward collective living as an attempt to transcend the standard nuclear family model also found expression in cohousing, and Sweden retained the term kollektivhus to refer to these projects. In fact, the first de facto kollektivhus resulted from the occupation and collective self-management of common spaces by tenants at the Hässelby family hotel in Stockholm. The Swedish cohousing projects that emerged thereafter (self-managed work cohousing) consist of standard-sized or slightly smaller-than-average apartments complemented by shared facilities managed by the residents themselves. The common kitchen is often the heart of the cohousing community. Taking a couple of shifts in one of the various work teams every three or four weeks is also quite common. At least initially, these were typically rental units owned by municipal housing companies (allmännyttan). [1]
Both in the history of Swedish cohousing and in that of Stacken in particular, the concept of the "intermediate level" developed by the feminist Research Group for the New Everyday Life is of crucial importance, as are the housing proposals of the fellow feminist group BiG (Bo i Gemenskap, Living in Community). Establishing this "intermediate level" involves transferring daily activities from the private, public, and domestic spheres to be shared by a collective of 50 to 100 people [2]. This concept, influenced by Dolores Hayden's popularized project of rethinking the relationship between the private and public spheres, developed in parallel with Stacken and served as one of its catalysts.
Other factors played an important role in the emergence of this then-novel housing model. In 1965, the Swedish state undertook an ambitious project: the Million Programme, constructing one million homes over ten years through state planning, modern urban design, housing standardization, and the progressive implementation of prefabrication. Ultimately, 25% of Sweden's housing stock was built during this program, including nearly all of Sweden's marginalized suburbs. As the project neared completion, shifts in purchasing power and changing public perceptions of desirable housing often made it difficult to fill the newly constructed buildings. The decommissioning of Gothenburg's shipyards and the resulting economic crisis in the city further exacerbated the issue in Bergsjön.
Amid the fertile ground of the 1970s feminist and countercultural movements, and with housing authorities eager to find tenants for empty high-rises, Lars Ågren stepped in. An architect of the residential development that includes Stacken and a professor at the Chalmers University of Technology's School of Architecture in Gothenburg, Ågren negotiated with various authorities to promote its transformation into a new experimental housing type. Workshops with students and prospective residents began in November 1979, and by the summer of 1980, the first tenants moved into the tower, including Ågren himself. The ground and fifth floors were designated for collective use; tenants tore down and put up walls, and that is how it has remained, for better or worse, to this day. Thirty-nine years later, the experiment is still ongoing.
The subversive energy of the 1970s—marked by a rejection of the traditional family, demands for creativity, opposition to the growing commodification of various aspects of life, and the rejection of labor as a separate activity—held great potential to challenge the way society was, and still is, structured. These ambitious goals, which in Stacken involved establishing a sort of intermediate level between the formal and informal spheres of life, remain far from being achieved on a large scale, even through alternative housing models. On the contrary, most cohousing projects in Nordic countries remain segregated enclaves of privilege. However, the evolution of this particular experiment yielded more complex and ambiguous outcomes.
Stacken achieved some success in shifting aspects of private life, primarily domestic chores and childcare, into this "intermediate level." Indeed, over the years, the building has mainly attracted adults with dependent children, proving less successful beyond this stage of life. The reason for this limitation may lie in its failure to take over services typically provided by the Swedish public sector, such as elder or sick care.
In an unexpected turn, the project took over building planning and administration, replacing a public housing sector that was otherwise in retreat. Since 2000, Stacken has been owned by a cooperative tenant association formed by its residents. Consequently, the management and design of these homes became the responsibility of their inhabitants, grounded in community labor and collective decision-making. While many cohousing projects became exclusive communities for the affluent, the self-managed Stacken resisted the growing commodification of the sector by reorganizing around community work rather than the social lives of its neighbors. Its location in the segregated neighborhood of Bergsjön is also significant. Although a more glamorous location would likely have compromised the project's inclusivity, a certain cultural—if not economic—distance from the surrounding neighborhood remains evident.
Like many other Nordic cohousing projects, Stacken shared a growing interest in green building. Recently, the residents pooled the production of most of their electricity—an unexpected intermediate level achieved by the project. The new solar panel facade turns Stacken into an energy-generating infrastructure designed to cover 96% of its residents' electricity demand.
Yet the building has not always shown such a great capacity to accommodate new needs. The persistence of most of the pre-existing standard apartments and much of the original building's spatial syntax speak to both the potential and the limitations of repurposing what would have been called "authoritarian architecture" in the 1970s for an emancipatory project. Curiously, and despite being modified and adapted in many ways, the most common apartment in Stacken today remains the original three-room layout—the standard Million Programme unit (normaltrea). This layout was the epitome of authoritarian architecture and anonymous housing designed for a standardized nuclear family of two adults and two children, which those involved in projects like Stacken in the 1970s rejected. Furthermore, its current use seems quite conventional; despite exceeding the Swedish average, Stacken's household density matches that of the surrounding Bergsjön neighborhood.
Nearly forty years ago, Stacken became the prototype for a new housing model in Sweden: self-managed work cohousing. This model has been replicated three times in Gothenburg, and today there are around forty cohousing communities in the country, housing about 0.05% of the Swedish population. Beyond the great significance this project has had over the years for many lives, and its valuable contribution to practicing and spreading its core principles of self-management, feminism, and direct democracy, Stacken's impact on society at large has remained marginal, even at a local scale. Nonetheless, the importance of its sheer existence in helping the collective imagine alternatives to the prevailing order should not be underestimated.
In any case, the question remains open. Stacken's common spaces present the main challenge for its residents in the near future. They still hold the potential to reclaim the ambitious original goal of a richer communal life for the majority, which was partially abandoned in previous decades. It is up to the collective to take on this task.
On October 20, the book "Stacken. An Ambiguous Utopia", published by Croatoan Industries, will be presented at the Radikal Bokmässa 2019 in Gothenburg. This text is an excerpt from the book, which can also be requested at croatoan@riseup.net
"An Ambiguous Utopia" is the subtitle of Ursula K. Le Guin's renowned 1974 science fiction novel, The Dispossessed. In Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson noted the significant role of this book in science fiction's rediscovery of the utopian subgenre starting in the 1970s. This novel would become the most prominent of a series of complex and ambivalent utopias that did not depict the ideal, isolated societies of classical utopianism, but rather societies that were simply more acceptable than the ones they left behind. It moves beyond the ideal world of modernity—a minimalist paradise of absolute unity, measurement, control, and transparency—to make room for a meta-utopia formed by a multiplicity of spaces of hope. In these spaces, the elimination of closure toward the outside, the transcendence of the myth of progress, a self-critical dimension, and a certain experimental drift point toward the new post-1970s utopianism. All of these qualities identified by literary criticism in this subgenre are also found in the housing experiments that I have elsewhere termed "trans-housing" [3], of which Stacken is an excellent example.
- 1. Dick Urban Vestbro, “History of cohousing – Internationally and in Sweden,” in Living together - Cohousing Ideas and Realities Around the World. Proceedings from the international collaborative housing conference in Stockholm 5-9 May 2010, ed. Dick Urban Vestbro (Stockholm: Division of Urban and Regional Studies, Royal Institute of Technology in collaboration with Kollektivhus NU, 2010), 49.
- 2. The Research Group for the New Everyday Life, The New Everyday Life – ways and means. Copenhagen, 1991: The Nordic Council.
- 3. Rodrigo Rieiro Díaz. “Cosmonautas del futuro. Experiencias de transvivienda para tiempos de posbienestar,” in Boletín Académico: Revista de investigación y arquitectura contemporánea, no. 8, 2018, pp. 79-102.
This article was written by Belén Maiztegui. The translation is powered by AI.
