Building Community Infrastructure

“We do alternatives,” said Eliseu Arrufat Grau, one of thirteen current members of the non-profit Barcelona-based cooperative Lacol. But both he and fellow member Cristina Gamboa Masdevall were careful to note that their alternatives are not the only ones on offer. Their cooperative housing project La Borda is just one (albeit award-winning) solution to the almost universal affordable housing crisis; it’s also particularly suited to Barcelona, where a rich history of cooperatives and a sympathetic mayor have created an ideal set of conditions for similar projects to flourish in recent years. Arrufat suggested that La Borda’s principles of self-development, community interaction, collective ownership, sustainability, comfort, and affordability can resonate with communities worldwide. But even as Lacol strives to identify replicable strategies for building community infrastructure, Gamboa cautioned that each project is ultimately one of a kind because the people involved are different. These kinds of projects are also very effort- and time-intensive for the architects,…