id22: Institute for Creative Sustainability

Creative Sustainability begins with local people and their respective cultures, resources, interests, challenges and dreams. This involves a further democratization of our urban society. Emphasized are long-term, attractive solutions for housing and urban space production. Qualitative improvements are prioritized over quantitative growth. Open-source urbanism is integrated with social justice, economic development and ecological balance. All urban residents enjoy rights to the city as well as rights to expression, meaning opportunities to help shape and manage their local environment. Sustainable urban development is a cultural challenge. It’s about quality of life!

CoHousing refers to self-organized, community-oriented and sustainable housing. Ideally, these projects are integrating, non-speculative and open to the neighborhood. Often motivated by a search for ecological, affordable and socially designed homes, CoHousing supports collaborative and self-managed social architectures.

Self-organization goes beyond common ideas of “participation,” emphasizing bottom-up, locally-initiated processes through which people express themselves directly and develop community, gaining capacities and power for local structures such as housing projects.

Sustainable city and society is only possible if diversity is there! Inclusion is a process, and it is important to work on creative solutions today in order to create really accessible cities for tomorrow. Our main focus is self-organisation and real examples of projects that contribute to an inclusive society. We have a bottom-up and a very interdisciplinary approach to diversity and inclusion that combines architecture, urban planning, geography, arts and social science.

Urban Lab. City of Possibilities. War Torn and Divided. Poor but sexy and gentrified. Creative City. German Capital. Playground for Urban Pioneers. Habitat for Squatting, CoHousing, Community and Cooperatives. Urban Farming and Gardening center. Magnet for students, budget travelers, refugees, experimenters, investors and homeless. Demonstration of Creative Sustainability. Berlin is all of these things!