Not a group home or commune: Europe experiments with co-housing

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This is the latest story from the NPR Cities Project.

In an abandoned building near Spain's Mediterranean coast, someone softly strums a guitar. Chord progressions echo through empty halls.

It's an impromptu music lesson, offered among unemployed neighbors in Alfafar, a suburb south of Valencia. The town was built in the 1960s for timber factory workers. It's high-density housing: tidy, identical two- and three-bedroom apartments, in huge blocks some 7,000 housing units in total.

But the local timber industry has since collapsed. More than 40 percent of local residents are now unemployed. A quarter of homes are vacant. Apartments that sold for $150,000 decades ago, are going for just $20,000 now.

That guitar lesson is just one way residents are using their free time and empty space creatively. And it's here that two young Spanish architects saw potential.

While still in architecture school, Mara Garca Mendez and Gonzalo Navarrete drafted a plan to re-design a high-density area of Alfafar, called Barrio Orba, using the principle of co-housing in which residents trade and share space and resources, depending on their needs.

"It's like up-cycling the neighborhood connecting existing resources to make them work," Garca explains. "For example, all this work force that's unemployed, all these empty spaces that are without use, all these elderly people that need help, all these natural resources that are not being taken care of making a project for all these things."

Through their architecture startup Improvistos, Garca and Navarrete submitted their Orba design to U.N. Habitat, a United Nations agency holding a competition for urban mass housing. And they won.

Redefining Public And Private Space

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Not a group home or commune: Europe experiments with co-housing