die HausWirtschaft.

Winner of the 1st NEB 2025 Champions Award in the category ‘Recovering a sense of belonging’.

This project, located in Vienna, Austria, is based on a building that combines affordable housing and shared workspaces. It consists of 48 flats, 9 guest rooms, spacious communal areas and around 3,500 m² of workspace (including co-working, therapy rooms, meeting rooms, event spaces and a bilingual nursery). The building is managed as a cooperative by its members, who participated in the design and decision-making through a participatory process, fostering a sense of belonging, community and collaboration among residents, freelancers and small businesses.

The initiative also stands out for its focus on sharing resources (space, time, tools) in order to reduce individual costs and environmental impact. In fact, it was conceived as a nearly zero-energy building, using district heating and cooling and photovoltaic panels, with cooperative management that reduces waste by half compared to the Vienna standard.

It represents a replicable model for sustainable urban development: an integrated combination of housing, work and community in a dense urban environment, offering a new type of habitat that goes beyond the traditional home/office dichotomy and redefines how we can live, work and share in a city.