Housing is an ongoing issue and the housing question is present every day: housing is currently hardly available, it is expensive and hardly corresponds to one's own ideas or individual living situation. The housing issue is undoubtedly the social issue of our time. At the same time, we have to realise that the political will to counteract identified shortages by compensating for them (e.g. through new construction) is hardly sufficient to solve the problem. To get to the bottom of the complexity of the housing issue, it is first necessary to understand housing in its interdependencies. After all, housing does not only take place in the home; housing is an everyday socio-spatial practice that is not unconnected with social developments, regulations, discourses and perspectives. Housing is produced.

Dealing with housing means first of all confronting a paradox that needs to be recognised and, at best, thwarted. For although society is aware of the housing situation as a problem, (market) delusions (re-)produce the production of housing - regardless of the diversity of actual housing needs. The type of housing that Häußermann/Siebel once described as the ideal type remains predominant - even in new builds: ‘3[-4] rooms, kitchen, bathroom, toilet, central heating’ (1997), while around 80% of households are occupied by one or two people (Statistikamt Nord 2019).

WohnWissen deals with the structures of collective housing in their interweaving of housing (as socio-spatial practice), social structures (as rules, orders, discourses that have become and thus change) and the housing that has also become/produced (as spatial material). The question of new social housing not only emphasises the demand for the expansion of the supply of affordable housing, it also focuses on new forms of collectivity/sociality in housing. The focus here is on the conditions for the success of collective forms of housing.