The interest in cooperative housing is growing, and the exhibition also promotes it
The exhibition maps the past and present of this form of housing in the territory of our republic from the times of Austria-Hungary to the present. The exhibition is installed in front of the building of the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Czech Technical University and until the end of January you can see both historical and modern photographs, documents and texts.
The authors of the exhibition managed to obtain interesting facts from the archives and attach to them modern images of successful cooperative projects, which were created thanks to cooperation with municipalities. “Visitors will get an overview of the beginnings of cooperatives in the times of Austria-Hungary, its expansion during the First Republic and the ups and downs that accompanied it under socialism. The space is also dedicated to current developments and trends in cooperative housing construction and is supplemented by interesting examples from abroad, “explains the content of the exhibition by its curator Anna Marie Černá from the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Czech Technical University.
The initiator of the exhibition is the DoDružstva association, whose goal is, among other things, to show the public that there is a future in cooperative construction. “We communicate daily with dozens of people interested in cooperative housing, and the question of how cities will support affordable cooperative housing and when the first such projects will be completed is the largest. We believe that cooperative construction is a good way to overcome the current housing crisis and enable one’s own housing, especially for young people, who now normally cannot afford it. Cooperatives are not a relic of the past. On the contrary, we are convinced that modern technologies, which fundamentally change the possibilities of awarding contracts, their control, methods of association, communication and voting of people and the possibility of financing real estate projects, will enable the return of cooperative construction, “notes Jan Eisenreich, founder of DoDružstva.cz.
In addition to DoDružstvo zs, the organizers of the outdoor exhibition are also the Czech Society for Housing Development zs and the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague.
Prague as a cooperative
Other housing cooperatives in the Czech Republic have been involved in other projects in recent years, but the Capital City of Prague also has ideas on how to improve the situation on the housing market with the help of cooperative housing. In the limitations of 2020, the Prague coalition agreed on a plan to support cooperative housing, which was prepared by Prague councilor Hana Kordová Marvanová (for STAN).
“The active participation of the city takes many forms. One of the proven ways is the cooperative construction of flats, in the lowlands the city participates by co-founding housing cooperatives, becoming their friends, providing suitable building plots and establishing the right to build cooperatives on these plots for up to 99 years. The cost of acquiring a cooperative flat will thus be reduced by up to a third compared to market prices in a given locality, ”says Kordová Marvanová.
Developers also have plans to build cooperative flats. “Cooperative housing is today a fully established and clearly standardized product that people of all generations are interested in,” says David Jirušek, spokesman for FINEP, which implements cooperative housing projects across the capital. “We have been dealing with this form of construction since 2011 and we can state that in the last two years the interest in acquiring a cooperative flat has been growing slightly but steadily,” adds Jirušek.
A similar trend is recorded, for example, by Česká spořitelna, which provides financing to both natural and legal persons. “Compared to previous months, we have recently seen a several times higher interest on the part of individuals in financing cooperative flats, throughout the Czech Republic,” confirms Lukáš Kropík from Česká spořitelna.
Cooperatives in the past
Once the first documented team in the world was founded by Scottish weavers in 1761, it began to form in our country about a hundred years later. The Gazdov Association, founded in 1845 on the territory of present-day Slovakia, is considered to be the first cooperative in Central Europe. The oldest cooperative in our territory was the First Prague Savings Association from 1847. However, the real development of cooperatives of all kinds began only after 1848, when serfdom and robotics were abolished.