The last decade has seen a growing social movement towards collectivity, sharing and participation. This paradigm shift can be seen in architecture as well: in recent years, increasingly innovative collective housing projects, organized around the principle of trading in private spaces for larger, more luxurious shared spaces, have been emerging across the globe - many of them realized through bottom-up grassroots initiatives. The return of the collective in architecture has resulted in inventive and surprising architectural solutions. This exhibition introduces and contextualizes this movement to launch a conversation about what it means to live together today. By taking a spatial and experiential approach to exhibition design it seeks to reach an audience beyond that of the typical architecture exhibition. An ambitious installation brings together 22 projects in large-scale (1:24) sectional models, highlighting the different collective and public programmes the projects have to offer for inhabitants as well as the surrounding neighbourhoods. Together, the models form an imaginary city that demonstrates how these projects contribute to and foster the quality of urban life. All project information, including drawings, texts and photos, are attached directly to the models, enabling the visitor to understand the projects while wandering through the model city. To recreate the experience of collective living on the scale of the individual flat, a 1:1 installation of a cluster apartment will be built. This new type of shared flat consists of a number of small apart-ments of about 20 to 35 square metres each with a bedroom, pantry and small bathroom, all of which are organized around a shared living environment with generous common areas and a large kitchen. Large-scale photographs as well as life-size photomurals of various shared and private spaces from real cooperative settlements provide an insight into the lived reality of these new forms of communal housing, in which inhabitants can share their daily lives with others while also having the ability to retreat to their private "apartment within the apartment" whenever they wish. The exhibition will contextualize this recent phenomenon by providing a survey of its historical background, including utopian housing developments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, housing cooperative projects in the 1920s, as well as the protest movements against housing shortages and real estate speculation from the 1960s to the 1980s in many urban centres. With additional film-based and photographic material as well as practical infographics mapping out the organizational structures and business models of the project initiatives, the show will provide an atmospheric overview of the spatial and conceptual possibilities inherent in these new forms of housing. In doing so, it celebrates the optimism and can-do spirit of the people who make them happen. The exhibition will open at the Vitra Design Museum in June 2017 and may involve another major international museum as a coproducing partner. publiarq.com