In summer 2017, we followed an invitation by Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny to take part in the public workspace of their project Care+Repair in the Nordbahnhalle; a project connected to the Vienna Biennale and organized by the Architekturzentrum Wien (Az W). In this way, the group Action Archive from Stockholm began to collaborate with the city planner and activist Beatrice Stude from Vienna. Our work followed a joint interest in common rooms and the commons. Since 2014, Action Archive has been exploring the history and role of common rooms in Swedish welfare housing. This publication collects the notes from our ethnographic field studies of summer 2017 of newly built common rooms in the Nordbahnviertel (the Northern Railway District) in Vienna. It comprises excerpts from guided home tours and interviews with representatives of the Nordbahn district management and a non-profit housing developer. This publication serves as point of departure for a Forum Theatre piece, which deals with common rooms as a conflict area between bureaucracy and community action that is shown in connection with the exhibition Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (Az W, 2019).