The article, originally published on Coop-News and written by Miles Hadfield, reviews the book A History of Collective Living: Forms of shared housing, edited by Susanne Schmid, Dietmar Eberle and Margrit Hugentobler (Birkhauser Basel, 2019), consisting of an historical survey of the progressive shift from central planning to grassroot-led urban development, commenting on how this changed the perspective on communal living and on the divide between private life and shared space.