The Valencian project “Cooperar per viure juntes” (Cooperating to Live Together), led by the Crearqció cooperative, is an initiative aimed at transforming access to housing from a community-based, sustainable, and non-speculative perspective.
Its objective, as well as its values, allowed it to be one of the proposals selected in the latest call for proposals from Connect NEB in 2025, one of the programs of the New Bauhaus community of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology.
Crearqció bases its work on the principles of inclusion, sustainability, and architectural quality, as its team is dedicated to rethinking how spaces are designed and inhabited, placing people’s real needs at the center. To this end, they organize citizen participation processes centered on the cooperative housing model based on a leasehold arrangement.
This represents an alternative to the traditional real estate market: There are no individual homeowners; instead, everyone involved is part of a cooperative that collectively manages the building. This model ensures greater stability and affordability, and fosters ways of living together based on collaboration and mutual care. We already have examples in Spain, such as La Borda in Barcelona.
“Cooperating to Live Together” focuses specifically on training and supporting groups, offering workshops, informational sessions, and practical assistance on legal, organizational, and financial matters. In this way, it promotes the model and indirectly encourages the creation of new cooperatives in the city of Valencia.
Thus, in essence, the project proposes a paradigm shift, which involves understanding housing not as a market commodity, but as a collectively managed right. Furthermore, it fosters closer relationships among community members, which inspire new, fairer, more accessible, and resilient ways of life, and ensure well-being. In this way, buildings and other indoor spaces—where we spend more than 80% of our time—come to be co-created by everyone.
