42 Cohousing Is Empowering People to Fight Back against a Global Housing Crisis
Learning Outcomes
- Apply the reading process to “Cohousing Is Empowering People to Fight Back against a Global Housing Crisis.”
- Summarize the article.
- Respond to the article.
- Create a design and rules for a cohousing community using what you learned from the video and article.
Preview the Article
Follow the steps below to preview the article “Cohousing Is Empowering People to Fight Back against a Global Housing Crisis.” Ideally, you should print the article and write your responses in the margins of the printed copy. To read more about previewing, visit the chapter on previewing a reading.
- Read the title. What does it make you think about? What do you think the article is about? What questions do you have? Record your predictions and questions on the printed copy of the article next to the title.
- Watch a video from PBS NewsHour about a cohousing development in Denmark. Record your thoughts and reactions to the video on the printed copy of the article.
- Read the first two or three paragraphs. What additional predictions do you now have about the article? What additional questions do you have? Record them on the printed copy of the article.
- Scan the article and notice the headings (e.g. Communal life). What additional thoughts or questions do these raise? Record them on the printed copy of the article.
- Scan the bolded and underlined vocabulary in the article. If there are any words that you do not know well, look them up in a print or online dictionary and write some notes about their meanings on the printed copy of the article. Keep in mind that some words have multiple meanings. For example, the word hinges is used in paragraph 1. This word has different meanings, depending on whether or not it is used as a noun or a verb. You will need to read the sentence containing the word to identify the part of speech and understand the word’s usage.
- Based on your preview of the article, what do you think is the central point of the article? (Don’t worry if you are not sure. This is a prediction or guess – you do not have to be correct as long as you are engaging your brain.) Record your prediction on the printed copy of the article.
- Based on your preview, do you predict that the article is narrative, expository, or argumentative?
Read Interactively
Now, read the article using the guidelines from the chapter on reading interactively. As you read, follow these steps to engage with the text.
- Pause to confirm or revise your predictions and to answer the questions you posed while previewing the article. Write down those revised predictions and responses to the questions as you read. If you cannot find the answers to your questions, save them for further research and discussion.
- Pause at other points to check for understanding of what you just read. Can you explain key ideas in your own words yet? If not, reread to clarify. It makes no sense to keep reading if you did not understand something or if you became distracted, which happens to everyone as they read. Ideas that come later in a text build on the previous ones.
- Pay attention to any vocabulary words that are confusing. Look up the words in a dictionary if they are interfering with your understanding, or mark them to return to later.
- Record any opinions or reactions you have to the reading.
- Write down any further questions that develop as you read.
Cohousing is empowering people to fight back against a global housing crisis
Johannes Novy, University of Westminster
November 2, 2022
1 The debate around how to fix the global housing crisis usually hinges on whether more market or more state is required. Some people stress the need for additional housing stock and less regulatory red tape, so that the market can create it. Others claim that stricter government measures – against ruthless developers and landlords, more rent control, and more public housing – are crucial.
2 Increasingly, policymakers are paying attention to what lies between the public and private sectors. The United Nations’ New Urban Agenda – a key international policy framework to promote sustainable urban development – highlights the benefits of “cooperative solutions, such as cohousing, community land trusts and other forms of collective tenure”. A slew of recent community-led housing projects across Europe and beyond show how this can work.
3 Cohousing includes all kinds of edifices, new and existing. It is not tied to a particular type of tenure. And the groups of people it involves can vary considerably in size. At its heart are two key principles. Residents do not only live next to each other, but with each other, in buildings that comprise communal spaces and facilities. And they take the lead, or at least are involved in, the design and management of their communities.
Communal life
4 German sociologist Anja Szypulski has lauded the “abundant potential” cohousing proffers for sustainable housing and neighbourhood development. The first way it does this is by promoting an ethos of participation and sharing.
5 Residents are involved throughout the building process. When, in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, a developer pulled out of a state-owned site in Cambridge, the city council opted for a cohousing initiative to build on the land instead, precisely because of the social and community benefits that would bring.
6 The resulting Marmalade Lane project opened in 2018 after four years, during which the cohousing members developed the architectural brief, sought planning permission and contracted builders.
7 Residents also often take part in actually building their homes too. The Church Grove project in Lewisham, south London, is a community-led housing development on an old derelict school and industrial site. When completed it will count 36 homes designed to be permanently affordable. To keep the costs low, future residents are involved in this construction process. They have already built a communal hall on the site.
8 Communality also shapes daily life in a cohousing project. Marmalade Lane residents share 42 homes – houses and flats, both – organised around a common house with a shared kitchen, refectory and fireplace, a pedestrianised lane, outdoor play area and garden, a laundry, a gym and a workshop.
9 Similarly, La Borda, in Barcelona, is a cooperative housing block comprising 28 apartments, organised around a communal, open-plan atrium. Residents share a kitchen-dining area, a laundry room, guest rooms and generous outdoor spaces. Their flats were deliberately designed small, with movable walls, so that a room belonging to one flat could become part of another, as the need arose.
Socially and architecturally sustainable
10 The La Borda project contributes to the wider community, too, by organising events and sourcing goods from local cooperatives. It is based on a participatory planning process and costs have been kept low through the use of smart low-tech solutions and a lot of self-help during construction by its future users, who are also responsible for the maintenance and management of the project. Decisions are made collectively in a general assembly and all adults participate in various committees that deal with different issues, from financial matters to communal dinners.
11 While the idea of committee meetings and doors facing each other won’t appeal to everyone, the benefits of knowing you’re not alone are clear. Residents at Marmalade Lane have spoken about children playing together, stay-at-home mothers not feeling isolated and retirees being engaged and occupied.
12 The UK Cohousing network describes cohousing as a “way of resolving the isolation many people experience today, recreating the neighbourly support of the past”. And research bears this out. A recent study on the way cohousing dwellers in the UK coped with lockdown found that many residents experienced a level of mutual support and care that went well beyond the general good neighbourliness of the early days of the pandemic.
13 Cohousing projects also encourage sustainability by typically being built for the long term. The Marmalade Lane buildings used environmentally-friendly materials and designs that promote low-energy use for a small carbon footprint.
14 Critics have lauded La Borda, meanwhile, for its bold innovation – the passive cooling and heating system; the fact that it does not include a car park and thus has a significantly lower projected carbon footprint; the way the architect-residents continue to improve the building as needs emerge. The project has been awarded the 2022 Mies Van Der Rohe prize for emerging architecture, with the jury noting its radical, “transgressive” approach to shared resources and capacities. It was deemed to be effecting “political and urban change from within the system.”
Institutional support
15 An EU-funded report on the right to housing highlights that cohousing has been “coopted by the market”. And it is true that cohousing nowadays can be less an alternative to market housing than an upmarket niche product of it, with prices of entry often prohibitively high.
16 Grassroots initiatives can find it difficult get hold of suitable sites and to finance their projects, especially when their budgets are limited. In many countries, housing, tax and lending policies create a huge bias in favour of traditional homeownership, while planning systems favour large developers.
17 For cohousing to thrive, then, institutional support is key, from facilitating access to public land to providing grants as well as planning support and technical advice. It also helps for projects and initiatives to team up and support each other, as an initiative in Germany shows.
18 Founded in Freiburg, Germany, in 1992, the Miethäusersyndikat or apartment-house syndicate, helps self-organised housing initiatives get off the ground, at scale. It is essentially a consortium of existing housing projects that acts as a non-profit, cooperatively run investment company, helping people to buy or build homes for cooperative use.
19 These projects are organised as limited liability companies, with both the syndicate and the respective residents as joint owners and the individual residents paying rent to the liability company they co-own. Residents also largely manage their properties themselves.
20 While residents are free to decide on most matters, including designs, the modalities of living together or rent levels, they are not able to convert their houses into traditional private property or to sell them. The syndicate’s approach is, at its core, about permanently removing housing from the market.
21 Similarly central to it is the idea of solidarity. Projects with more financial resources support those with less. All residents contribute to a syndicate-wide solidarity fund, that gradually increases over time as other burdens such as loans decrease. This in turn makes it possible to support new projects, of which it currently has at least 177 in the works, in Germany and elsewhere.
22 These 177 projects are not only enabling thousands of people to escape the vagaries of the housing market. In many cases they also demonstrate the innovative potential that comes with empowering people to take control of the creation of their homes and communities.
This article was amended on November 3 ,2022 to correct a typo.
Johannes Novy, Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning, School of Architecture and Cities, University of Westminster
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Reflect
After reading the article, use the following questions to reflect on the content of the article and your reading process. See the chapter about reflecting for a discussion of why this is a crucial step.
- Try to paraphrase the main idea in a sentence. This may be challenging because you have read the article only once. If you are struggling, do your best. You can refine this when you reread and summarize the article.
- Is the article primarily narrative, expository, or argumentative? What is the purpose of the article? In other words, why do you think the author wrote it?
- Which predictions were accurate, and which did you have to revise?
- As you previewed the article, you wrote questions. What questions remain unanswered after reading the article?
- What else do you want to know about the article or topic of the reading? Write down any additional questions.
- How did previewing the article help you to understand and engage with the text while reading?
- Where did you struggle to understand something in the text, and how did you work through it?
- What, if anything, could you have done differently to improve your reading process?
Summarize
Complete a summary of the article by following these steps. Make sure you have read the chapters about Reading to Summarize before proceeding with the summary.
- Reread the article and complete the Summary Notes. See Preparing to Summarize for a review of this topic and an example.
- Then, use your Summary Notes to write a one-paragraph summary of the article. See Writing a Summary for a review of this topic and an example. Make sure that you include in-text citations and the Work Cited.
- Use the self-assessment/peer review questions from Evaluating a Summary to self-assess your summary or invite a peer to provide feedback.
- Use the self-assessment or peer feedback to make changes to your summary.
Make sure you are comfortable with your summary before advancing to the response. If you misunderstand something in the article, then your response may be skewed based on that misunderstanding.
Respond
Write a response to the article by following these steps. Make sure you have read the chapters about Reading to Respond before proceeding with the summary.
- Use the Response Questions from Preparing to Respond to brainstorm possible ideas for your response. See the example in that same chapter.
- Read over your replies to the Response Questions. Choose one idea to write about in your response. Express that idea in a topic sentence. See Writing a Topic Sentence for a Response for examples. Ask a peer for feedback on your topic sentence.
- Brainstorm about possible support you could use in your response. See Generating Support for a Response for examples.
- Use your topic sentence and ideas from the list of support to write a one-paragraph response. See Writing a Response writing guidelines and examples. Make sure that you include the Work Cited and in-text citations for any quotes or specific ideas from the article.
- Use the self-assessment/peer review questions from Evaluating a Response to evaluate your response or have a peer provide feedback.
- Use the self-assessment or peer feedback to make improvements to your response.
Extend: Create
If you were to design a cohousing community, what would it be like? Write down or draw a diagram of what spaces would be included (e.g. a common kitchen and eating area) and what it would look like. Then, write down the rules that you think would be necessary to have in place for the community to be able to live together in a cooperative way and maintain the cohousing community. Share your creation with your classmates.