How Gamified Cohousing turned abandoned Finnish buildings into shared economies, and exposed the bureaucracy that still fears citizens who build together
Gamified Cohousing is a Finland-based model for transforming vacant or underused buildings, such as former schools, stations and civic properties, into shared places to live, work, repair, gather and govern together. Rather than treating housing as a finished product delivered to passive tenants, it combines adaptive reuse, participatory renovation, shared facilities, local micro-economies and digital self-management. Residents and users can help maintain and activate the building through visible tasks, shared responsibilities and a point-based system supported by the Gamified Cohousing app.
This article by Pedro Aibéo, founder of Gamified Cohousing, argues that Gamified Cohousing is not only a housing experiment, but also a test of how serious European cities are about circular economy, participation and adaptive reuse. If public policy tells us to reuse buildings, reduce construction waste and involve citizens, why do municipal procedures, insurance rules, warranties, labour law and taxation often make practical reuse so difficult? Why is participation welcomed in workshops and consultations, but treated as suspicious when citizens pick up a hammer, repair a room, move a reused boiler or help govern a building together?
Through the case of Gamified Cohousing Lappeenranta, located in the former Kanavansuu School, the article examines the gap between civic slogans and municipal reality. It asks what cities would need to change in order to support phased, safe and participatory reuse instead of responding first with fear, control and administrative escalation.
When the language improves as the building deteriorates
Europe has developed a remarkable talent for congratulating itself in advance. It speaks of “smart cities”, “green transitions”, “innovation districts”, “living labs” and “resilience strategies” with the serene confidence of a continent that believes a problem has been half-solved once it has been given a civilised name. Yet beneath this liturgy of urban virtue, too many useful buildings are left empty, declared obsolete, or allowed to decay until demolition can be presented as prudence.
This is the small dishonesty at the heart of much contemporary urban policy. Abandonment is renamed transition. Demolition is renamed renewal. A former school becomes an “asset”. A station becomes a “site”. A civic building, once full of voices, becomes a liability on a municipal spreadsheet. The language improves as the building deteriorates.
Gamified Cohousing began as a practical refusal of that vocabulary. It asks a simple and therefore rather dangerous question: why are we tearing down usable schools, stations and civic buildings while claiming to lack housing, space, money and time? Its answer is not another slogan, nor a sentimental preservation campaign. It is a way of testing whether empty buildings can still be treated as civic institutions rather than dead assets. Its earliest formulation was blunt enough to be useful: “We turn empty buildings into economies.”
The absurdity it responds to is not hidden. It is visible in every empty school, every abandoned station, every municipal building left to rot until demolition can be presented as common sense. The tragedy is that these places were never merely bricks and beams. They were classrooms, waiting rooms, workshops, kitchens, thresholds, memories. They were civic infrastructure before we had the fashionable vocabulary for it.
At the same time, Europe’s housing crisis has become impossible to politely ignore. House prices, rents and construction costs have risen sharply across the continent, while more people spend unsustainable shares of their income simply to remain housed. The statistics have the dry precision of officialdom, but behind them is a simpler fact: housing has been made expensive, lonely, standardised and remote from ordinary people’s agency.
The environmental contradiction is just as severe. Construction and demolition waste remains one of Europe’s largest waste streams. Public institutions speak warmly of circular economy, adaptive reuse and climate responsibility. Yet the ordinary fate of many useful buildings is still abandonment, administrative paralysis and eventual demolition.
Gamified Cohousing is not a decorative variation on co-living. It is a challenge to the way modern cities have forgotten the social function of buildings. It asks whether a building can again become more than property: whether it can become a small civic economy.
Housing as a small republic of responsibilities
For most of history, housing was not only a private asset. It was a social technology. Monasteries, farmsteads, guild houses, workers’ settlements, schools and extended households all organised shelter together with labour, learning, care, food, tools, rituals and obligations. The modern habit of isolating residential life from work, culture and local economy is not eternal. It is recent, and not always successful.
Of course, separation once had its reasons. Zoning, fire regulation and building classifications did not emerge from pure malice. They arose from smoke, disease, overcrowding, industrial danger and the perfectly rational desire not to be burned alive by one’s neighbour’s workshop. But rules created to protect life can, over time, harden into rituals that exclude it. The category becomes more real than the building. The permit becomes more sacred than use. The spreadsheet wins an argument that the citizen was never allowed to enter.
From Haussmann’s Paris to the functionalist diagrams of the twentieth century, modern urbanism has repeatedly translated political questions into technical ones. Who belongs here? Who may live here? Who may work here? Who may decide? These questions are rarely asked directly. Instead, they return disguised as corridor widths, use categories, insulation thresholds, fire classes, procurement rules, insurance clauses and tax interpretations. A city that refuses politics can still exercise power. It simply calls it procedure.
Gamified Cohousing is interesting because it does not answer this with nostalgia. It does not propose a return to a pre-modern village or a fantasy commune where everyone pretends to enjoy meetings. It proposes something more difficult: a modern common house, supported by digital tools, adaptive renovation, mixed uses and transparent forms of self-management.
The word “gamified” is liable to cause a wince. We live in an age in which almost everything trivial has already been gamified: attention, outrage, consumption, delivery, loyalty, distraction. But here the word has a more serious function. The game is not an ornament. It is a way of making visible the labour that housing systems usually hide.
Cleaning, repairing, hosting, organising, gardening, welcoming new residents, opening a room for an event, keeping track of shared equipment, these are not marginal acts. They are the work by which a building remains alive. In conventional housing, much of this work is either outsourced, ignored, resented or left to collapse into passive-aggressive notices on stairwell walls. In Gamified Cohousing, the attempt is to turn such work into recognised participation. The Gamified Cohousing app supports coordination of shared tasks, spaces and responsibilities, making everyday self-management legible rather than leaving it to heroic volunteers or invisible exhaustion.
The historical irony is that this technologically assisted model is recovering something older than the market apartment: the idea that a building is a small republic of responsibilities.
Lappeenranta: when public ideals meet municipal power
Nothing reveals the promise and the danger of this model better than Gamified Cohousing Lappeenranta, located in the former Kanavansuu School. The school was built in 1909 because workers at the nearby sawmill had hundreds of children needing education. The sawmill owners donated land and logs, and the building was designed by architect Yrjö Sadeniemi. More than a century later, after the school had closed, the City of Lappeenranta decided to sell it. In 2023, Gamified Cohousing Oy won the auction with its proposal.
A school is not just a building type. It is a promise made by one generation to the next. When such a place is abandoned, the failure is not only technical. It is civic. To turn it into housing, workspaces, cultural rooms and shared facilities is not merely to “reuse real estate”. It is to continue the biography of a public building.
But here the story becomes less comfortable, and therefore more important.
In Lappeenranta, the problem was not a lack of public ideals. Finland has ideals in abundance. The problem was what happened when those ideals met municipal power. The building was in an early-stage participatory renovation phase, with safety and maintenance works being clarified and carried out. Instead of beginning with dialogue, inspection and practical guidance, the city’s response escalated through assumptions, unannounced visits, exclusion from meetings and a damaging public narrative.
A Yle article then presented the situation in alarming terms, with fire-risk language and a prohibition-of-use framing. The article appears later to have been corrected and removed, while the final city decision did not impose the kind of residential-use ban implied in the public discussion, but concerned renovation works. The damage, however, had already been done. Tenants were frightened, reputations were harmed, insurance became more difficult, and a project attempting adaptive reuse was pushed into defensive survival.
The point is not to re-litigate every detail of an administrative file in a magazine article. The point is more serious. In Lappeenranta, power arrived first; dialogue, if at all, arrived later. This is the reverse of participatory governance. It is the anti-cooperative city.
Democracy is not only the right to vote every few years, nor the right to be invited to a workshop after the important decisions have already been made. It is also the right to monitor power, to contest it, to demand reasons, and to be heard before judgement hardens into enforcement. A democratic city is not one without officials. It is one in which official power remains visible, answerable and obliged to listen before it acts.
What makes the case more revealing is the comparison. In other Finnish municipalities, similar questions around Gamified Cohousing sites have reportedly been handled through advance contact, scheduled inspections, discussion with the owner and architect, and practical clarification of which works require permits. The same path was available in Lappeenranta. It was not the only possible interpretation of law that failed. It was the culture of administration.
Procedure without judgment
This is why the problem cannot be reduced to “strict Finnish law”. Law is not a machine that applies itself. It is interpreted by people, in offices, under pressure, with biases, habits, fears and local politics. The same rule can become guidance in one municipality and a weapon in another. The democratic problem begins when officials exercise discretion while hiding behind the fiction that they are merely obeying procedure.
This condition might be called over-engineering. It is not the presence of rules. It is the multiplication of rules without a corresponding culture of judgment, humility and accountability. Rules designed for fire safety, accessibility and energy performance can become an iron cage of procedures, where officials invoke categories that no longer fit and democratic agency is displaced by procedural correctness.
This is not an argument against safety. Nobody serious wants unsafe housing, informal exploitation, fake renovation or deregulated slums. The question is whether safety is best served by officials who refuse dialogue, exclude project owners from meetings, allow public narratives to harden before facts are tested, and treat citizen-led renovation as suspicious until proven otherwise. A democratic city should know the difference between risk management and administrative aggression.
The hidden vetoes of reuse
The Lappeenranta story also exposes another blockade: insurance. Experimental reuse often dies not by demolition order, but by a quiet collapse of insurability. A simple example says it all: a plumber may refuse to move a perfectly usable water boiler from one room to another, not because it cannot technically be done, but because if the used boiler later breaks, neither their insurance nor the building owner’s insurance may cover the damage. The same object, still functional, becomes administratively dangerous simply because it is not new. Once a project is framed as non-standard or potentially non-compliant, insurers retreat, banks hesitate and contractors protect themselves. This is one of the hidden contradictions of circular economy: public policy tells us to reuse, but insurance and warranty systems still reward the clean fiction of the new. Demolition can therefore appear safer on paper than reuse, even when reuse is the more ecological act.
The next blockade cuts into the moral core of communal life: labour and taxation.
Finland, like many countries, has a tradition of communal help, neighbours gathering to repair, build, harvest or prepare. Yet contemporary renovation can turn this common sense into a legal minefield. A resident who helps paint a room, clean a shared hall, restore a garden or repair a fence may be seen not as a participant in a community, but as a worker, a contractor, a tax event, a liability risk or an unlicensed actor. A time credit can start to look like taxable income. A rent reduction in exchange for maintenance can look like undeclared compensation. A community repair day can become administratively suspect.
Of course labour law matters. Of course taxation matters. Exploitation must be prevented. Safety work must be competent. Professional work must be respected and paid. But a society that cannot distinguish between exploitation and mutual aid has lost one of the foundations of civic life. If every act of help must disguise itself as a contract, then participation is not encouraged; it is extinguished.
This is perhaps the deepest contradiction in the current European language of participation. People are invited to workshops, consultations and “co-design” sessions. They may place coloured stickers on maps. They may offer memories, preferences and post-it notes. But when they try to participate materially — by repairing, maintaining, adapting, governing and caring for the building, the system becomes nervous. Participation is welcome as opinion. It is dangerous as action.
Gamified Cohousing is a test of whether participation can be allowed to become physical again
Its recognitions matter in this context not as vanity, but as evidence that this is not a marginal fantasy. The concept received early startup recognition in 2018, was later selected as a finalist for the 2025 New European Bauhaus Prize in the category “Regaining a Sense of Belonging,” and has been selected for the United Nations / UN-Habitat World Urban Forum 13. The wider work behind it has also been recognised through Architectural Democracy research awards, including support from the Kone Foundation and the City of Helsinki, alongside international architectural awards connected to previous built projects.
But recognitions should not be mistaken for protection. Awards do not open a municipal door. Prizes do not force an insurer to think. International validation does not guarantee local dialogue.
What the cooperative city should learn
That is precisely why the cooperative city should care. If we remove the conflict, we are left with a pleasant brochure about adaptive reuse. If we include it, we have the real politics of reuse: who gets to define safety, who gets to speak to the press, who is heard before enforcement, who can insure non-standard projects, who can help without being criminalised or taxed into passivity, and whether circular economy is a public principle or merely a conference slogan.
The practical lessons are clear. Empty public buildings need pathways for phased participatory reuse. Enforcement should begin with hearing, inspection and written clarification, not surprise visits and public escalation. Insurance systems should be brought into circular-economy policy instead of being allowed to quietly veto it. Labour and taxation rules should create safe harbours for resident participation, communal maintenance and non-exploitative mutual aid. Reused materials need credible warranty frameworks instead of being left as legal orphans. And city officials should be expected, culturally if not legally, to speak with the people building something before speaking around them.
None of this requires abandoning safety. It requires taking safety seriously enough to distinguish real danger from bureaucratic discomfort.
The old school in Lappeenranta is therefore more than a case study. It is an accusation. It asks why so many buildings are declared obsolete precisely when our social imagination has become obsolete. It asks why a former place of learning should be easier to sell, abandon or administratively paralyse than to convert into a place where people can live, work, gather and govern together.
The cooperative city will not be built only by new construction, nor by yet another masterplan promising participation after the important decisions have already been made. It will be built, in part, by returning to the buildings we already have and asking a more demanding question: not “what is this property worth?”, but “what kind of common life can this place still make possible?”
Gamified Cohousing’s answer is imperfect, practical and therefore worth taking seriously. It does not pretend that architecture can save democracy. It suggests something more modest and perhaps more radical: that democracy must once again learn how to inhabit architecture.
Pedro Aibéo is an architect, civil engineer, researcher and founder of Gamified Cohousing Oy, a Finland-based initiative transforming underused buildings into shared living, working and civic spaces. His work connects adaptive reuse, participatory renovation, circular economy and democratic governance, and has been recognised through the New European Bauhaus, UN-Habitat World Urban Forum 13 and Architectural Democracy research initiatives.
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