In Roquetes, a neighbourhood in northern Barcelona, a housing cooperative is showing that a home can be built around care and community rather than market value.
La Morada, which opened in October 2024, is Catalonia’s first feminist and LGBTQ+ housing cooperative. Created by women, lesbians and trans people with backgrounds in feminist organising, its 12 homes were designed for a way of living that doesn’t treat the couple or the nuclear family as the only default.
Residents don’t buy their flats. Instead, La Morada uses the Catalan “cession of use” model: the cooperative holds the right to use and manage the building on land leased for 60 years, with a possible extension to 75. The land was bought in 2018 by Fundació La Dinamo, which selected La Morada through an open call. The arrangement keeps the homes in cooperative hands and protected from property speculation, which matters in a neighbourhood facing rising rents.
Shared care is built into the design. Alongside their private flats, residents share a kitchen and dining area, a laundry, a guest room, a workspace, a creative area and a rooftop garden terrace. The building was designed by Lacol, a Barcelona architecture cooperative, together with the future residents, and its layout can adapt as households and their needs change.
The building is also environmentally friendly. It has an A-rated energy certificate, with solar panels on the roof and efficient heating systems. A ground-floor commercial space is set to be rented to a cooperative, social economy organisation or non-profit, giving the building a role in the wider neighbourhood.
La Morada is a reminder that housing can be about more than square metres. As writer Cesca Rampley puts it, sometimes a better way of living starts with something simple: “a shared kitchen, a decent guest room and a group of people deciding that care should have a place in the floor plan.”
