Cooperative Architecture Urban Transformation as Process, Design as Research Method, Space as Dialogue

Abstract

Event

We are pleased to invite you to the presentation of Cooperative Architecture, a newly published book by Riccarda Cappeller. The event will feature a conversation between the author and her dissertation supervisors, Jörg Schröder and Roberto Cavallo, who closely accompanied the development of this research. Joining them, Pedro Guilherme — co-host of the CA²RE Conference alongside Sofia Salema — will contribute as a critical interlocutor, offering reflections and impulses from an outside perspective.

Together, they will explore new perspectives on architecture as a cooperative and transformative practice and discuss the methodological approaches proposed in the book.

About the Book

What if cities are not designed, but co-written layer by layer?
What if architectural thinking begins with a dialogue instead of a drawing?

Cooperative Architecture traces how architecture can emerge through relational processes of co-creation, co-habitation, and collective authorship. It reimagines the city not as a fixed object of design, but as a living field of improvisation, repair, and care.
The book discusses three exemplary sites of urban transformation: Granby Four Streets in Liverpool, Can Batlló in Barcelona, and ExRotaprint in Berlin. Each case unfolds as a laboratory of practice, demonstrating how architecture can become a performative and transformative cooperative act.
Cappeller weaves together ethnography, artistic strategies, and design-based approaches — from situated writing to visual mapping and documentary filmmaking. Through this framework, Cooperative Architecture offers new ways to conduct architectural research and curate urban situations.

Critical Voices

Riccarda Cappeller’s „Cooperative Architecture“ offers a richly situated and critically reflexive engagement with architecture as a performative, collective practice. Tracing spatial knowledge through lived experience, co-creation, and design-based approaches, this book repositions the architect as an engaged participant in social transformation. A vital contribution to critical spatial practice, it highlights architecture’s potential as a collaborative and socially engaged practice.
— Ana Betancour, Professor, University of Strathclyde and Malmö University