Introduction

Montreal's deindustrialisation from the 1960s was coupled with downtown renewal, which effectively meant that many low-income, working-class neighbourhoods were wholesale cleared for new projects. Faced with the threat of demolition and eviction, and fed up with spiralling rents and unmaintained apartments, tenants and other stakeholders organised to take control of their housing situation and mobilised to save their neighbourhoods. The housing cooperative emerged as a viable model. This was such a common story that in 1984, Radio-Canada aired, at prime time and on Sundays, ‘La Pépinière’ (‘Nursery’), a one-hour, five-episode miniseries drama fictionalising the real-life stories of tenants who decided to take collective action, form cooperative housing and become a community. ‘Security’, ‘tenure’ and ‘mutual aid’ were the keywords used by the protagonists in fictionalised or documentary media representations about housing cooperatives in this period.

In the midst of a strong movement of housing co-ops that sought to offer alternatives to gentrification and to house disadvantaged societal groups, women in various government and non-profit positions, women who were part of women's organisations, and the women's movement helped each other and other women in precarious housing situations to establish housing co-ops for women. Feminist proponents of permanent and affordable women's housing argued that housing was central to women's emancipation, that is, to the designing of ‘non-sexist’ cities. They also developed specific ideas about how women's housing could architecturally cater to women's needs.