Case Study: Moos Coliving
A 28 bedroom residency in a former bathtub factory in Berlin, Germany
Editor’s note: this is a guest post by Nicole Reese, part of Regen Tribe, which is “a collective of community co.creators building an accelerator for regenerative community land projects” (more on that below). She documents the current workings of Moos, a legendary coliving space in Berlin that has evolved through many phases.
This is part of an ongoing series of deep dives on coliving spaces. To see others, visit the Supernuclear directory.
Name: MOOS
Date founded: 2012
Location: Berlin, Germany
Rented or owned: Owned by project founder, rented to short and long-term community residents
Amount of space: There are 3 separate building structures that all used to be part of the bathtub factory. Spaces used for short-term rentals total at 28 bedrooms, 11 baths, and the number of permanent lodgings is roughly ~20-24 bedrooms and 10 baths.
Governance: Owner/Community Manager-led (top-down hierarchy)
The Regen Tribe team members spent an unforgettable summer at MOOS as part of a Cohere residency, in a fruitful exploration of polyorganization and radical collaboration.
We travel to and document community spaces so we can compile our learnings and make them available for others in our resource hub. This article reflects the meetings and interviews with the stewards of the spaces, as we mapped our experiences and observations of the community during our stay.
Origins
Originally a bathtub factory, MOOS takes up the entire end of Moosdorfstraße street near Treptower Park in Berlin. The buildings were acquired 11 years ago by a couple, Willem and Julia – with some of the original founders of Garbicz Festival – and renovated to create a community space for regenerative placemakers, radical activists, and subversive artists.
The community includes various buildings, such as the MOOS Garden and the Neubau (aka Sonnenhaus), housing residents and hosting events.
The MOOS Garden is a 6-story brick building home to Kreatur, a retro-modern coworking space, Querfeld, an imperfect produce business, the Urban Healing Unit “UHU”, which is an apartment transformed into a chic sauna, and the speakeasy-style basement.
We stayed in the newer residency building “Neubau”, which we playfully renamed to “Sonnenhaus” (Neubau just means new building in German, Sonnenhaus means sun house). It has 10 private rooms across 4 floors and a rooftop terrace, and it sits on top of a spacious event hall. This is where the community and its “extended family” regularly host conferences, dinners, film screenings, art shows, sound experiences, lightning talks, mini festivals, and musical flings. We used it to host Solarium, an escape room-style immersive party where guests came dressed as characters from the future to solve puzzles and follow a timeline to create a positive world.
Behind MOOS Garden is a spacious courtyard hosting eclectic local businesses: an edible fermentation operation with a mushroom lab; a costume design collective that uses found and repurposed materials; a bar that sells local brews and goods from the community; and several artist/maker ateliers that create a unique atmosphere that resonates with creativity and purpose.
Inner workings
The local community manager, Jacob Huhn, a tall, loveable German, is the go-to person for everything in the community. The residency spaces are also being managed by Charlie Fisher, a thought leader from Dark Matter Labs and Traditional Dream Factory, and Saeed Abu Alhassan, who has built multiple community spaces in Lebanon and Turkey.
Permanent community members have a monthly dinner to check-in, but there is a clear distinction between MOOS as a business and MOOS as a community. Events at MOOS happen at the discretion of Julia, the owner, and Jacob, the community manager.
If you’re wondering about the income model of MOOS, the money mostly comes from residencies – hosting outside organizations and groups of aligned people to stay for 1-3 months. Other sources of income include renting the hall and the different spaces out to events.
The owners acquired MOOS through bank loans. Because the spaces were originally a factory, they required a lot of money to renovate and make them suitable to live in. Income goes mostly to cover costs and to pay back those loans.
Each residency organizes itself on how it wants to make decisions, usually in a weekly house meeting. Daily and weekly maintenance is done by residents, while replenishing toilet paper, soap, etc. is completed by the community manager, which is a full-time paid position. Residents split the cost of these items, and everyone is – of course – expected to clean up after themselves. Part of the culture was to give a daily 5 minute gift to the space – take the recycling out, wipe the counters, and so on. Occasionally one of us would go on a binge and spend an hour cleaning the kitchen or organizing the laundry room (i.e. me when I had gone a week without giving my 5-minute gift). Every 2 weeks, professional cleaners are paid to come to do a deep cleaning.
House rules are stored in a wiki, and long-term stewards like Charlie are working on the “Free House Project” there, transforming the space into a smart house that owns itself. There’s even a bot in the Telegram chat that will privately message you the lockbox code when you are added to the group.
Lessons learned
Key Learning #1 Overtasked community manager
Jacob wears all the hats when it comes to managing the community, and the amount of information he has to keep track of is simply too much. A single towel goes missing and someone’s immediate response is “Call Jacob, he’ll know what to do”. This was pretty well-known by everyone in the community, and caused some issues of logistics and professionalism with the various residencies. We’ve seen this in other communities (although it’s typically the project founder) where one person is taking on too much responsibility because there’s no other strong candidates or a limited budget offers limited options. One solution is hiring more crew members, either through salary or by trading them something like space within the community. When we left, MOOS had just hired an additional person named Norma to help manage affairs, and checking in months later, we hear she is doing a marvelous job.
Key Learning #2 – Difficulties of hosting short-term residencies
Hospitality and short-term stays are an excellent business model and keep a healthy inflow of energy into the community. However, with people always coming and going, the space can get energetically and physically chaotic. Long-term community members withdraw, because it is hard for them to feel attached with the quick turnover of people, and the exciting events become commonplace, if not overstimulating, for them, because they are not the ones planning them. Even short-term residents desire to know who is coming when and how long they are staying.
Complete strangers would often come into the building without warning, especially during events – to use the bathroom if there was a wait for the one downstairs, to use the kitchen, or simply to wander around what were supposed to be private coliving spaces. Even in loving community spaces, there is still an issue of security when you have a high volume of people coming through your space, and unfortunately there were valuable items that went missing during these events.
Solutions: multiple residents requested a public calendar, so they could see who else would be staying in the coliving spaces and for how long, and despite desires to have fully communal spaces, it is perfectly normal to have locks, visiting rules, and restricted access areas.
Key Learning #3 - Founding partners
The dynamic of the leadership in the community has changed since its conception, and this underscores two lessons we've learned in other communities:
1. Have clearly written agreements for how your community will adapt to change over time
As everyone's paths change over time, you should build in contingency plans for how to adapt as the community evolves. Consider how to build a legacy hand-off into the community plan, how to create agreements around ownership, and plan for if ownership dynamics change. This applies even and especially if you are friends, romantic partners, or family members.
2. Have more people on your founding team, or train a successor
We've observed that a good number of communities are built by 1 or 2 people, usually couples or friends. Having just a few more people who take active leadership/ownership positions allows for a council that can share responsibilities so that they can lean on each other, even when the priorities of a leader need to shift away from the community for personal reasons.
Conclusions: the magic of aligned living
MOOS is one of the most exciting hubs for intentional coliving and regenerative innovation in Berlin and the changes it's undergoing are ultimately positive. If you are curious about its next evolution, read more about their Community Funding Mechanism.
Typically, the Regen Tribe team is focused on building regenerative neighborhoods in rural areas, but we appreciate the inspired connections and convenience of urban coliving. At MOOS we were privileged to meet an array of luminaries in the fields of regeneration, village building, web3, crypto, DeFi, DeSci, indigenous partnership, and coliving projects.
Every day we discover new coliving projects that are weaving a more regenerative world through the power of community. This is the magic of a coliving hub where you are co.creating the world you want to see.
Postscript: We at Regen built this social networking platform for everyone who is trying to build regenerative communities, giving the projects, community seekers, and community founders a chance to find each other and connect, as well as have a centralized place to find all the literature, resources, and orgs that work on this topic instead of having to trove the internet for it. - Nicole
Suggested further reading:
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I really loved how you included feedback on things you would/do approach differently with your space. I also really liked how one of your goals with the space is to bring up problems when they are at a 1 vs. a 10. Ahaha. One thing I would do differently is try to have co-ownership....