Cooperative Housing for the 2000-Watt Society is an emerging, international network of different architecture faculties over the world. Besides the TU Wien, students at the TU Braunschweig, Carnegie Mellon University/Pittsburgh, University of Southern California and California College of the Arts are working on the same topic. We make use of our newly acquired skills of digital working and set up an arena for global exchange for a topic which is an intrinsically global one.

One of our starting points is the concept of the 2000-Watt society which was developed at the beginning of the 1990s in Switzerland and postulates that every earthling is allotted a primary energy budget of 2 kWh. The second proposal we are building on is by Hans Widmer who believes in the power of neighbourhoods and their potential for restructuring society in order to arrive at the 2000-Watt society.

Neighbourhoods, as big as the territory of a cat in a dense urban environment, that are based on concepts of sharing and cooperative ownership are the key entities for Widmer. Even though we start from the physical quantity of 2000-Watt, this Studio is not interested in punctual, technical solutions, but in broader concepts of new forms of living. We are looking for manifold ways we can meet the demands of the future.

Vienna is our testing field. Social housing here has a strong relationship to its history. We are going to start to look at this history in order to find out what early traces we can find of the aspired future. And we are going to look at a selection of concrete sites and their different frame conditions for implementing cooperative housing for the 2000-Watt society. Finally, this Studio is going to be the Viennese contribution for an international project.