Welcome!
We are a small group from Göttingen that wants to start a lowtech housing project. We are still in the beginning: we look for more members, put first lowtech approaches into practice and plan our next steps until buying a house.
We write about current projects on our blog.
If you are interested in nour project or consider getting involved you can contact us (non bindingly).
The project
We we want to build an autonomous housing project in Göttingen and buy a house together. We currently think it makes sense to join the Mietshäusersyndikat for this endeavour. Bank and direct loans for the purchase of the house will be paid off through our rent payments. We want to establish a solidary distribution of rent. In the long term the house should be removed from the real estate market and provide secured and affordable housing. The inhabitants will decide on matters regarding the house themselves.
We want to live communaly and create a space in which all inhabitants can feel comfortable. For this, there will be one or multiple shared flats in which each inhabitant has their own room. There will be large communal spaces (kitchen, living room, garden), we want to share a lot of infrastructure and spend some of our live together. Our housing project should provide people the opportunity to live there long-term.
We want to grow crops in the garden and operate a biogas digester. Furthermore, we want to have an effect on the neighborhood through public projects like an open workshop or similar.
What does LowTech mean?
We mainly want to develop a way of life in which we drastically reduce our energy demand. In the long term we want to become independent from the electricity and gas grid. We will produce energy for example with solar panels, covering all of our energy demand with it will however only work if we consume considerably less. Some luxury and comfort, which we have nowadays grown accustomed to, will therefor be lost.
How exactly life in our house project will look like, will be seen in the future but we already have some rough predictions:
Heating: we will follow the principle of heating people not spaces. There are possibilities, for example through hot water bottles, to keep the body warm even in a colder environment. These are much more energy efficient than heating up the entire volume of air in a room.
Electricity: we want to deelectrify many energy-intensive processes. A small amount of electricity will be produced through solar panels or human effort (for example on bicycle generators).
Kitchen: We will build our own biogas digester and cook with the biogas. To save energy, we will cook communaly. We also want to test lowtech approaches for cooling and storing food.
The state of things
At the moment, we are on the lookout for more people to join our project since we can only found an association when we are seven members. This is the first step on our way to join the Mietshäusersyndikat and to buy a house. We aim to found the association by June 2026 and afterwards start looking for a suitable house.