From school to co-housing in Fuenlabrada: an architecture competition to SHARE

SHARE is a project developed in Fuenlabrada, a municipality in the southern part of the Madrid metropolitan zone. Fuenlabrada, a stronghold of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and part of the "red belt" of the Community of Madrid, has a public administration with a "europeist vocation" (Fco Javier Ayala Ortega, Mayor of Fuenlabrada, Milma UIA). It is active at the EU level, and the city has received numerous recognitions and participations in projects related to social inclusion and innovation (NOW, YouthStart, Horizon, INTEGRA, LIFE, Equal, and Interreg IVC, among others), as well as more recently through the UIA fund MILMA project   about integration between migrant and local populations and labour inclusion of unemployed people) and URBACT “Cities 4 Co-Housing”.

Fuenlabrada's new EUI challenge is to create a new intergenerational solidarity space by offering autonomy-maximizing housing for the elderly and affordable living spaces for the youth in the former dwelling of the elderly, which will be assisted by an intersectoral community care unit. The proposals envision two major axes: First , the renovation and reconstruction of a former school for the creation of up to 20 co-housing flats (depending on the proposal of the architects) aimed at the city's seniors who own an apartment in Fuenlabrada's centre and want to move into a supported coliving space. According to the winning architectural competition, the units in the coliving will have two bedrooms, a kitchen and an adapted bathroom, allowing the recipients to live independently. The design will be supplemented by social areas and services for the complex's older residents.  Second,  the initiative entails making the properties held by these elderly individuals available to young people and families so that, with minimal upgrades and the owners' agreements with the municipality, they can be rented at a reasonable price. The scheme for this circular use of housing in response to age needs will be completely designed within the framework and lifetime of the project, presenting challenges and exciting opportunities for experimentation for the public administration and stakeholders involved. The first "EUI diary" report, scheduled by the end of 2024, will include a more complete overview of the project as well as a description of the main participants.

Fuenlabrada's history is unique among Spanish cities. Fuenlabrada experienced the greatest increase in population in all of Spain during this period, transitioning from a rural hamlet in the 1960s to a strongly urbanised metropolis in the decades since. People, mostly young people and families, flocked to the metropolitan region in search of work, primarily from the south of Spain and other nearby agrarian centres. Fuenlabrada's population density has increased significantly from 476.5/km² in 1975 to 4,961.45/km² by 2024.Poblacion Fuenlabrada (https://www.ayto-fuenlabrada.es). The General Urban Plan (Plan General de Ordenación Urbana), approved in 1999, highlighted the towns' efforts to oversee a golden period of building homes and infrastructure, such as roads, schools, and health care facilities, to serve the newly populated area.

The influx of people never stopped by phenomenon of immigration concerned mostly people from Latin America, Africa, the Maghreb, and Romania and more recently from China due to the Polígono Cobo Calleja, a huge economic area overwhelmingly dedicated to the wholesale distribution of Chinese imports (considered the biggest one in Europe). Unemployment is moderate in comparison to Madrid's metropolitan area, and the city's population is relatively young (19.08% is under the age of 20).

Nonetheless, Fuenlabrada has been gradually losing population over the last ten years. Other trends that can be identified in other Spanish cities are replicated here: The income-housing affordability gap is wide, particularly for young people who are unable to afford market rents (due to a systemic lack of public social housing) or homeownership due to rising costs, as well as real estate market pressure in Madrid's core. Furthermore, because Spain has one of the lowest fertility rates in the EU, the infrastructure built over the previous thirty years of the twentieth century, such as schools, may become obsolete.

SHARE innovates by reimagining an approach, never tried previously in this context, to address these difficulties holistically, testing a new cycle of home accessibility based on age-needs relationships and repurposing the vacant of an old school.  The SHARE project revolves around the School of Saint Esteban, which was established during Fuenlabrada's rapid growth but is no longer completely operational. The School of Saint Esteban is also a natural hub for the neighbourhood: it is located in the heart of a residential area, visible in all of its volume and open spaces from every corner of the streets, and it is here that the project's initial kick begins, as evidenced by the design competition.

In the spring of 2024, the municipality issued a call for proposals for the new design of the senior cohousing school inspired by New European Bauhaus principles. In mid-July, approximately 30 architects were invited to visit the school's site. Architects will be requested in the competition to come up with unique ways for refurbishing the new school while considering the technical advice of SHARE partners. The project will be debated and adapted to a participatory format for a group of elders and young people, which is being built and animated concurrently by SHARE stakeholders. The Madrid Chamber of Architects serves as one member the Jury, but architects from all around Spain have come to Fuenlabrada to redesign the school for the SHARE project. "This is one of the few calls for architects for public housing in Spain, and my office wants to participate in this competition because we are asked to invent a collaborative housing . a model that is slowly growing with few experiments in Spain," said one architect whose work specialised in collaborative housing. "the added value of the EU also would give visibility to the project and the collaboration with the inhabitants will make this project a potential pilot" according to another prospective rival.

Following the competition, full-fledged collaboration on co-design and co-implementation will begin. However, this will not occur with future direct beneficiaries of the SHARE project, but rather with a sample of young and elderly who are involved, assisted, and animated by Animajoven and Matia Foundation as part of their SHARE project tasks. Anima Joven, SA a public company working with young adults in Fuenlabrada's community centre, is serving as a consulting body for the SHARE project. The goal is to acquire intelligence from young people to help co-design the SHARE concept, particularly in terms of solidarity, by acting as a liaison between young people and seniors.

The Matia Foundation, founded on Jose Matia Calvo's experience in old residential setting research and design, supports the elderly in their transition to cohousing at Saint Esteban School. Matia provides technical assistance and advice during the actual design process of the call for architects, taking architectural and psychological aspects into account, as well as suggestions on how to organise private/public and care-related spaces in the school based on its experiences with elderly residential/care homes. 

The UNED (National University of Distance Education) duty of evaluation, and dissemination will begin with a participatory intergenerational evaluation using action research methodology. So far, UNED is planning the participatory process, which is scheduled to begin in October 2024. Khora Urban Consulting partner will be in charge of the project  monitoring.

The municipality of Fuenlabrada is orchestrating the advancement of the project in time with the schedule proposed to the EUI,  coordinating stakeholder cooperation and managing the competition. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the project is the design scheme for balancing the "affordability" of rents for young people and the elderly's ownership rights in the cohousing over time. The Instituto Municipal de la Vivienda de Fuenlabrada (IMVF), a municipal enterprise, began its work by building a record of case studies of cohousing for the elderly, and is currently in the process of studying a scheme from a legal standpoint to ensure the feasibility of the SHARE project.

Credits: Pictures by the author taken in July 2024. Thanks to the SHARE team for the editing.