Proposal for EUROPAN 12 competition The Adaptable City – Inserting Urban Rhythms, that follows the need to reduce the ecological footprint, help resolve the energy crisis, combat the greenhouse effect and preserve non-renewable resources. Here in Copenhagen, the chosen building represents a great challenge to propose a significant example of a new living idea.

Thinking about a solution that could be easily attached to similar building (of the strategic area and/or all the city),CoS0 is a Co-housing Sustainable prototype that could be split and assembled in a different ways according to the needs of other blocks.

The whole solution wants to be a sustainable intervention with a low impact for the community: the building from outside stay almost the same with light signs of what happens inside.

CoS0 is composed of various elements, each one with proper recognizable characteristics and mixed in an organic system of private, semi-private, common and public functions of the everyday. The modularity of the elements permits a simple realization of the entire proposal by phases, according to the exigencies and the resources of the inhabitants:

1. Opening the courtyard and the roof to the community connecting them with the ramps system
2. Climbing the corners linking the shared rooms by the suspended paths
3. Organizing new modular apartments with the installation backbone closing the system with cantilevering boxes.
4. Managing the Co-Housing and Housing improvements Our project suggestion can be considered completed at the end of the third phase, but it will work also at the first phase or it can be improved in a fourth phase…

The Co-housing system has the main importance to the project and wants to be the more flexible and inspiring possible, involving the inhabitants themselves more and more from the first phase of the realization to the third one and from here on, according to their knowledge/abilities and following the cooperative’s will.

The shared areas are many and they offers different kind of activities depending on the typology they refer to:

• The courtyard and the roof, as open-air huge spaces, have a free distribution of facilities.
• At the ground floor the community can find the more public facilities that can be rented to extern or managed by the cooperatives.
• The big corner’s collective rooms are meant to be as flexible as the users want, but they especially can collect all the activities that need big sheltered spaces.
• The corridors/boxes can be used for semi-private purposes.

Thanking to simple adjustments for courtyards and roofs, the inhabitants could reach a great variety of new areas for green activities with no need of taking more m2 from the city area.

The system is made easily perceptible for new visitors with the use of colours. They can immediately understand from the courtyard where the common areas are located – thanking to the use of bright gradating colours – and how to reach them following the black line up to the roof. The system is totally accessible by wheels and the bikes can be parked on every floor.

Sharing some of the everyday activities the new apartments can occupy a smaller surface and collect only the very private functions. Thinking about the variety of the possible inhabitants and combining them with the possible environmental conditions the Street Guild of Copenhagen could calculate a table of solutions – for all the similar areas of the city – that the costumers could refer to when they want to change their own apartments.

The apartments are organized around a backbone that collects installations, kitchen and bathroom and the customers themselves can move the priority activities (bed/living) on the side of the house that is better lighted and/or noise protected.

Each unit has a self aerated system that permits to save some energy (and money) for air conditioning. The fresh air of the prevailing winds is collected on the railway side, filtered, pulled trough a vertical duct to all the floors and released on the top of the building. This system is conditioned (heated/cooled) by the geothermal energy kept from the ground-water under the project building and transmitted to the radiant panels hided in the false ceiling.Rain water (collected on the roof) arrives to the apartments for not potable domestic uses.

Residents are the users of the system, but the aim of CoS0 is to turn them into the proper massive energy that makes all the Co-housing system work. Technologies and materials are the lower cost possible to make them easily understanding and maintaining by the inhabitants themselves. On each stage of the realization they can participate to the development choosing more and more the common growing direction to follow. The existing coperative housing associations could manage a variety of activities:

• Courses and rental of spaces to collect money from those activities to finance together the building maintenance.
• Time-banking: big common areas where they can teach/learn/produce something useful for themselves and the community welfare (works, lessons, baby-sitting, etc.)
• In an improved stage (from the third on) the co- habitants could also activate a co-financing system to borrow/lend money each other and auto-finance the co-hounsing life.

In a district like Vesterbro, where “different segments of society live side by side with each other”, we think that each person can teach/ learn something new from the others. The building is now physically and ideologically open to the community for a continuous social cooperation that would improve the quality of living.