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Empowerment through design? Housing cooperatives for women in Montreal


 Focusing on the architecture of three co-ops in Montreal established to support women in the 1978–88 period, this article examines the relationship between empowerment and design in the context of gender-conscious cooperative housing. Deindustrialisation from the 1960s was coupled with downtown renewal, which effectively meant many lowincome, working-class neighbourhoods were wholesale cleared for new projects. The housing cooperative emerged as a viable model to protect access to housing. Against this backdrop, women in various government and non-profit positions helped each other and other women in precarious housing situations to establish housing co-ops for women. Feminist proponents of permanent and affordable women’s housing argued that housing was central to women’s emancipation, that is, to the designing of ‘non-sexist’ cities. The article treats the built environment of the co-ops as evidence to study if and how residents transformed their surroundings, and complements this with qualitative interviews with former and current residents to understand how the physical environment has, in turn, shaped their lives. While the co-op movement characterises itself as a type of solidarity network with open membership, the quality of architecture, or the deficiency thereof, in a social environment with already scarce resources can lead to tensions among memberresidents. However, the historical housing co-ops, as well as ongoing initiatives to establish new women’s co-ops, demonstrate the need and desire to pursue intersectional housing justice via the cooperative model, and the article’s findings point to the need for increased attention to and investment in architectural design.Key messagesIn the 1970s and 1980s, feminist scholars of the built environment argued that affordable and supportive housing was central to women’s emancipation, that is, to the designing of ‘nonsexist’ cities. To date, a systematic study of gender-conscious affordable housing projects is missing from the literature.While in the US, it was the community development corporations through which early experiments in housing for women were realised, in Canada, it was the shared-ownership, member-resident cooperative model to which women turned to.Earlier, large-scale cases of housing co-ops in Montreal were outcomes of resident mobilisation against developers and state-led gentrification; however, the members of women’s co-ops were typically recruited via women’s networks, and building sites were selected following co-op formation. The latter co-ops were built with low budgets, eschewing a participatory design process, construction quality and communal spaces that could have fostered mutual aid networks.While the co-op movement characterises itself as a type of solidarity network with open membership, the quality of architecture, or the deficiency thereof, in a social environment with already scarce resources can lead to tensions among member-residents. Case studies show that the co-ops can also evolve into organisations with ‘intersecting oppressions’.
