Gosse 17

We are one of the biggest and oldest self-administered left housing projects in Göttingen that arose out of students' struggles. In the past few years, our focus has shifted to "housing for all" and organising with housing projects that are asking similar questions. Even though most left housing projects in Göttingen arose out of student struggles and left organising, the recent conversations around housing extend the question of who is still not able to reach and be included. Who are the people that still face significant barriers in accessing these spaces?

Our focus on housing for all is deployed as a rhetorical question: Can such forms of alternative housing be used to protect trans folks? Sustain refugee livelihoods? Can they lend solidarity to internationalist struggles? Beyond a politics of diversification, how do these projects ensure dignity for all? How do they arrive at policies and cultures of living with each other rather than relying on the material securities of socio-economically heterogeneous groups? During the Action week, we'd organise a series of events that put these questions in perspective through workshops and presentations on how to build commons, bringing together various similarly minded and curious housing projects, and putting up a small exhibition that highlights some of the themes we want to bring forth through our intervention.

Our actions matter in our context because conversations to diversify and dignify housing are still nascent and face resistance within German society. Our programming is intersectional and builds on community knowledge coming from multiply marginalised identities and social movements. Even within the field of architecture, the social implications of the discipline have only recently started to enter the mainstream. We hope that interventions like ours would contribute uniquely to the programme.