Paper short abstract:

The talk will address the changing arrangements and orientations of a cooperative settlement in a long-run perspective from 1919 to 1969. Special attention is paid to spatial and symbolical aspects of communitization and its limits under different social circumstances.

Paper long abstract:

The Freidorf settlement near Basel was founded in 1919 as a reform-orientated village community. Rooted in the swiss cooperative movement, its aim was to organize numerous domestic, cultural and leisure activities on the basis of mutual support, but also to orient the village towards social reform in a broader sense. It provided new homes for 150 families with at that time remarkable furniture and comfort. The founding concept saw the self-contained dwellings as centerpieces of the cooperative arrangement and therefore ascribed to them specific privileges and obligations. Thus they were embedded in the spatial and symbolic order of the cooperation and reflected the ideological expectations of the founders.

In the long run, however, social change undermined many of the once self-evident basic conditions of family life in the village and its overlappings with the superior cooperative. This was especially true for a second generation of settlers that moved in during the economic upturn of the 1950s and 1960s. Their practices and ideas of housekeeping, use of space, social commitment and cooperative self-help differed fundamentally from the previous customs. The internal handling of this challenge shows a difficult renegotiation of demarcations that were about to expire. In particular this was the case for the structuring of private, collective and public spheres and the involvement of the individual members in the (also changing) cooperative aims and activities.