Sufficiency in Housing: Exploring sustainability-oriented living arrangements: Progress report 1 – The role of infrastructural organizations

This report summarizes progress made on the ‘Sufficiency in Housing’ project during fieldwork which took place in June 2022 in Freiburg and Heidelberg (DE). Sufficiency is a process of questioning what is actually needed and desired, making ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ subject to negotiation and debate and ultimately leading to collectively decided limitation (Heikkurinen et al, 2019) as well as reorientation beyond materialist notions of prosperity. The project’s overarching question is: How does sufficiency manifest in sustainable housing communities? We visited four community-led housing initiatives and interviewed six people, including both residents of these communities and individuals working for organizations aimed at supporting these projects from conception and design to construction and continuation.