Wohnen
Living between town and country

Car-free and independent of fossil fuels – that’s how Rogier and Miriam wanted to live with their children. Together with like-minded people they built their own house: from old tires and earth.

​During the real estate crisis, Maartje and Marcel bought a former barracks building. Apartments are now being built where the German occupiers used to be accommodated.

Van Bo Le-Mentzel is an unconventional thinker. The architect became known for his simple and inexpensive self-assembly instructions for Hartz4 wooden furniture. Then he extended the idea of democratic design to dwellings, developing living accommodations on bicycle trailers and tiny houses on wheels.

Germany is an affluent country, and yet there are more and more young people without permanent residence or living on the street. Many are stranded in Berlin.

To keep Leipzig affordable for its own residents, the city promotes alternative living and working spaces. It has now become a sort of urban laboratory experimenting with new and unusual models of collective, cooperative and solidarity-based housing.

Everyone has their own idea of the best place to live. Goethe.de/kultur asked four people why they have chosen to live in the countryside or in the city.

A different way to live: unconventional and whimsical ideas from Germany.

Germans prefer to rent rather than buy an apartment. Why is that? Our video explains this uniquely German trend.

The German rent control law known as the “Mietpreisbremse” or literally the “rent brake” was designed to slow rising housing costs, but has not really solved the problem. In an interview, economic researcher Claus Michelsen talks about some other approaches that might rein in soaring rents.

Is the online Airbnb flat sharing platform making Berlin’s housing shortage worse? Three students analysed the data to help answer this question. And reached some surprising conclusions.

Affordable housing has become scarce in many German cities, where skyrocketing rents are displacing low-income residents to the outskirts. The problem is by no means new though: In the 1970s and 1980s, people in Germany waged fierce battles against investors, building by contested building.

The prefabricated building is celebrating its comeback as a bastion of inexpensive housing – thanks not least to the business savvy of certain entrepreneurs in the real estate sector.

Cities are changing. They’re growing bigger, but also denser and more expensive. Widespread gentrification is driving many who can’t afford the rising inner-city rents to the outskirts. Paris is no exception. But projects like Grands Voisins are looking for alternatives.

Working on a train in India, video conferencing on Skype from a beach in Thailand, enjoying an after-work apéritif in a new city every week – digital nomads make the most of the new technologies to see the world, earning their daily bread as they go.

Barcelona is Europe's favourite destination for weekend trips and a popular stop for colossal cruise ships. The housing crunch and other problems caused by mass tourism have given rise to a wave of local resistance.

There are as many homeless people in the streets of Montreal as there are stories. A report on the situation of the weakest inhabitants of Canada's eastern metropolis.

Displacement due to rising housing prices has long been a major problem in Canada. The Montreal project Brick by Brick tries to counteract this. We spoke to the Managing Director of the project, Faiz Abhuani.

Being an artist in Canada’s largest city is tougher than ever. Artscape, a Toronto-based non-profit urban development organization, is developing affordable condo spaces for artists to work and live in. 

The building sector accounts for roughly one quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. New energy-efficient and environmentally sound construction and renovation methods are finally catching on in France.

In our interview, the sociologist Ingrid Breckner talks about how housebuilding and urban development can improve integration and how conflicts in society can be avoided.