Housing is scarce — that much has become evident in the last few years. As real estate prices in big cities continue to skyrocket, conventional ideas of housing development prove unable to meet demands. The reaction to these challenges has been a silent revolution in contemporary architecture — towards collective building and living. In recent years, increasingly innovative collective housing projects have emerged, many of them conceived and realised through grassroots initiatives. Unlike the overwhelmingly mono-functional housing of the modern era, new collective housing projects often have non-residential functions that can be used not only by residents but also by people from the neighbourhood. These projects are based on the understanding that housing forms an integral part of the wider urban structure. Well-designed buildings alone cannot solve the housing problem but have to connect spatially and conceptually with their surrounding contexts if they are to become lively urban spaces rather than dormitory cities. New collective housing is therefore not limited to your “own four walls” but also radiates outwards with multiple communal functions, becoming urban and public in the process. The twenty-one collective housing projects shown here are presented as sectional models and assembled into a piece of fictional city. The design of the model sections accentuates the communal aspects and their contribution to the city by presenting all the communally used rooms and areas in detail and colour-coding them according to how public they are. The photos are the work of photographer Daniel Burchard, who has documented the communal areas of eight projects in Berlin, Basel, Zurich, Vienna, and Tokyo.