Architects Against Housing Alienation – Not for Sale!: 9. Mutual Aid Housing

Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA) occupied the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2023 with Not for Sale!, their campaign of ten demands for decommodified housing in c\a\n\a\d\a. The following is an extended description of one of these demands and proposal made up of an activist strategy, a plan for implementation, and an architectural project.

By AAHA Mutual Aid Housing contributing team

 

Community gathers outside of high-density social housing in Montreal’s urban core. The project includes low-cost housing for families, a much-needed elementary public school, non-profit organizations, and a clinic.

9. Mutual Aid Housing

We demand mutual aid housing.  In c\a\n\a\d\a most public and privately funded housing is mono-functional and isolating. In the dense urban cores of large cities, single-use developments create alienation. To create housing that connects residents to each other and to the city around them, we demand mutual aid housing in the urban core that encourages solidarity, anti-hierarchy, direct distribution of resources and reciprocal exchange. Mutual aid housing is a space designed to facilitate cooperative support among people of diverse backgrounds and experiences, from refugees to local residents.

Habitat Solidaire proposes a mixed-use residential and community building located in a currently under-utilized transit node in central Montreal.

Typical solutions to the problem of housing affordability often push social housing to marginal locations with poor access to transit, jobs, social services, and cultural amenities, while expensive plots of land in the city’s centre are reserved for profit-making developments.

Community organizations in the neighborhood work intensively at place Émilie-Gamelin, located opposite the site of the team’s proposal.

When social housing (and much private market, multi-family, middle-income housing) is built, all communal programs and spaces are cut for budget reasons. Only bare-bones units of housing are constructed. This leaves housing units isolated and unsupported, leading to disconnection and disfunction. When newcomers arrive, or refugees flee to c\a\n\a\d\a, and arrive in these housing units, they are vulnerable to these flaws.

View of the community and collective levels showing the connections between the different programs. Massing diagram describing the various residential configurations present in the project, including studios, 1-, 2-, and 3-bedroom apartments, and maisonnettes. These respond to the wide variety of living needs of the residents in the community.

We demand that high-density social housing be built in the urban core on public land that provides access to transit, jobs, and social services. The sites, big enough to cultivate community and include expanded and supportive programming responsive to neighborhood needs, must be given to community land trusts.

Vertical organization plays a pivotal role in articulating the various programs and community spaces within the project.

Only decommodified housing can provide the expanded shared spaces for communal programs, setting the foundations for a practice of mutual aid where community members work together to meet their needs through cooperation. Further supportive programming for refugee resettlement, managed through a mutual aid approach within an accommodating environment, must be included to respond to neighbourhood needs. It is only by combining the creation of community-driven housing with supportive programs for social cohabitation that we will be able to end housing alienation.

Interior courtyard spaces in the project are designed as hubs for community activities such as reading groups.

Such a project for this nationally applicable demand has been initiated in downtown Montreal by a nonprofit organization founded by writers in 2014. La Maison du Savoir et de la Littérature, a social innovation hub, will be located on the site of a former interurban bus station, the « îlot Voyageur », above the busiest metro station in Montreal, Berri-UQAM, next to Quebec’s National Library (BAnQ) and north of Place Émilie-Gamelin. The initial program of the project, a housing COOP, has evolved to include low-cost housing for families, a much-needed elementary public school, non-profit organizations, and a clinic. It also addresses Montreal’s transitional housing shortage for refugees and responds to the strong presence of the unhoused in the neighbourhood.

Education is of critical importance to the project, where meaningful engagement between parents and educators creates a learning environment that celebrates and respects the various backgrounds of the community.

In this project, mutual aid is directly, but not only, linked to the presence of writers who can support the linguistic integration of refugees and provide homework help to schoolchildren. The porous architecture of the building creates several indoor and outdoor collective spaces, thus encouraging meetings and exchanges as well as well as initiatives such as community gardens. It also ensures natural lighting and natural ventilation in each unit type, therefore offering a very pleasant living environment.

Community and collective gardens are integrated into the courtyard and terrace spaces of the project, encouraging local food production and nutrition education.

Mutual Aid Housing Contributors:

Region: Montréal

Activist: Marc-André Fortin, Table de concertation du aubourg Saint-Laurent; Éric Michaud, Samuel Vanzin, Comité logement Ville-Marie; Kevin McMahon, Interloge; Isabelle Richard, Maison du développement durable; Pierre Samson, Maison du Savoir et de la Littérature

Advocate: Ipek Türeli (McGill University)

Architect: Anne Cormier, Howard Davies, Randy Cohen, Gabriel Tessier, Fannie Yockell, Atelier Big City

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