The situation of communal housing in Hungary

Authors: Annamária Babos, Petra Madaras-Horogh

Cohousing is a form of housing where tenants develop their housing conditions and living environment through community cooperation, based on common goals and interests. Residents voluntarily and consciously enter into a community with each other, sharing spaces, facilities, tasks and activities to the extent they determine. In Hungary, a real example of cohousing is still missing. This paper describes the evolution of cohousing in Hungary. It describes the main current grassroots projects and expert organisations, and briefly looks ahead to the challenges and steps that are likely to be taken in the field of implementation in Hungary. It reports on the establishment of the Community Living Initiative in 2012 by a small group of architects, with the aim of comprehensively exploring and promoting in Hungary the broader forms of grassroots cooperative housing that are prevalent in Western European countries. In 2019, part of the group founded the CoHousing Budapest Association, whose members had different experiences in the field of co-housing and embraced a variety of expertise. In their vision, they envisioned a Hungary where cohousing is an optional form of housing. As a first step, they aimed to promote Budapest and to support and connect communities already integrating cohousing methods.