Our relationship to water fundamentally shapes how we organise our daily lives and think about housing, community, and sustainability. Taking place during MOME’s Course Week in early February, the Co-operatives: Living with Water Collectively design sprint and international symposium explores how contemporary design and architecture can respond to housing and ecological crises in the cultural, community, and ecological contexts of water. The goal is to generate new design approaches and community responses to changing social and environmental conditions through the everyday practices of co-operative housing and communal living, with particular focus on the role of water as a shared resource and to the housing situations of socially vulnerable groups. Working in multidisciplinary, international teams, students develop their own community housing concepts. The programme concludes after one week, on 13 February, with a public presentation of the projects and a symposium featuring contributions from researchers, architects, and designers. 

The first speaker of the programme, Programme Lead of the Global Housing Design MSc at the University of Liverpool and former MOME student Johanna Muszbek eyplores burried and often fragmented histories of co-operative housing in Britain in her lecture Land, Equity and Communal Living Types. She will be followed by University of Liverpool researcher Juliana Yat Shun Kei, who analyses Hong Kong’s distinctive housing policies through locally rooted co-operatives that have been operating since the 1950s, in particular co-operative models in fishing villages, including floating residential communities established with the support of US-based humanitarian organisation CARE. 

The development of Israeli–Palestinian housing models is discussed by architecture historian Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler, tracing their evolution from agricultural kibbutzim to urban residential communities. As the lecture highlights, the kibbutz as an architectural model played a key role in collective forms of living, as well as in the relationship between modern and postmodern housing architecture. 

Next, Architect Ádám Pirity presents Hungary’s first community housing experiment, the Miskolc Collective House. Created in 1979 in a joint effort by students and designers, the project was notable for its distinctive spatial arrangement and its participatory design process, which was unprecedented in the era of socialist industrialisation.  

In the second section, Academy of Fine Arts in Catania researcher and graphic designer Elisa Raciti presents Sentieri Immaginari, a project that puts abandoned wetlands – including salt pans and marshes – back on the map. By involving local communities through walks and discussions, the project develops new forms of collaboration and spatial practices, allowing the value of these neglected sites to become visible again. 

In their research project Defending Co-operatives, researchers at the University of Liverpool Lucy Tarry, Oliver Langdown, Charlotte Brooks and Ryan Headley explore how housing co-operatives can build collective resilience rather than relying on individual forms of defence through one hundred international examples. At the symposium, they present findings showing that spatial, social, and economic “defensive” layers can function as sustainable systems of care when housing is treated as a shared practice of living together rather than as property or a service. 

The intercultural role of visual communication is addressed by design researcher Ágnes Jekli, drawing on a decade of research conducted at Open Doors Hungary. Art and Design Management student Emese Bukovinszky, class of 2025, discusses her research into modern-day slavery in Hungary, focusing on domestic servitude as a deceptive and exploitative form of dependency, and proposes an action plan developed using the toolkit of social design. MOME lecturer András Kerékgyártó introduces Around One Table, a project that explores the values and possibilities of collective design, tradition, and dialogue through a piece of community furniture. Researcher Janka Csernák shares the conclusions of the Waterside Voices project, implemented in Brussels, Rijeka, and Budapest with the involvement of the MOME Society & Action Lab research group, designed to turn the Danube, the Rječina, and the Senne into active “green and blue” urban spaces again by opening up new community areas along their banks for everyday use by the locals. 

The student projects developed during the design sprint are assessed by a diverse international jury with expertise in urban planning, social sciences, graphic design, and cultural diplomacy. The jury includes urban historian, urban studies expert, and co-editor of the Partizán urbanism podcast Orsolya Sudár; Chief Architect of Budapest and key designer of the visual identity of Metro Line 4 Zoltán Erő; architect and systems-thinking-based urban development researcher Boglárka Jakabfi-Kovács; Director of the British Council in Hungary and Slovakia Georgina Szilágyi; graphic designer and doctoral candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania Elisa Raciti; and Chief Architect of Hegyvidék and spatial planning and public interest alignment expert Márton Péterffy. The event was developed by Erzsébet Hosszu, Johanna Muszbek, Zsuzsanna Gál, and Balázs Marián, with project management by Kinga Dér. 

Co-operatives: Living with Water Collectively - Design sprint and Symposium 

9-13 February 2026 

MOME Auditorium 

Zugligeti út 9-25., 1121 Budapest 

Detailed programme: MOME | Szövetkezetek: Együttélés a vízzel 

Facebook event: (20+) Co-operatives: Living with water collectively | Design sprint & Symposium | Facebook