Collaborative housing:

In Sweden, the housing shortage for vulnerable groups is extreme. Can co-design and co-building help make collaborative housing more affordable? Is it a possible way forward for young people and other vulnerable groups to get into the housing market? The present article, which is based on a transdisciplinary action research, examines the implementation of a co-design method aimed at attracting young people.

The theories the co-design method is based on came largely from Alexander and Livingston, and the research questions were formulated as follows: What parts of the theories is the co-design method based on? How have the theories been integrated into practice? What results did the method have when implemented among young people? To sum up, there are a number of core values, deriving from these theories and earlier experiences, on which the co-design and co-building method rests. These values are crucial to the experience and to the method having potential of being scaled up.

Many of the core values have been successfully integrated into the method, but several of them remain to be worked on. Among the latter are participatory calculation and offering clients standardization on as small a scale as possible. In addition, training architects to become codesigners is important, as is addressing to the need for ‘community carpenters’ and ‘community engineers’.

Housing is a bottleneck for a range of issues: shelter, equity, societal integration, and well-being (UN Habitat, 2014). In Sweden, there is an extreme housing shortage, especially for groups with a weaker economy (Sveriges Allmännytta, 2018). Older and younger adults, single-parent households, newly arrived migrants, and students are especially affected (Boverket, 2020). Policymakers and planners do not seem able to manage the balance of power, and they continue producing plans that strengthen exclusion from the housing market for more and more groups in society (Baeten et al., 2015; 2017).

In various European countries, the physical, social, and financial design, governance mechanisms and management practices of collaborative housing have delivered affordable and high-quality housing. In Sweden, affordable collaborative housing remains marginal due to numerous challenges in municipal procedures and processes, laws and regulations, markets and financing, dissemination of models and experiences, and processes within collaborative housing initiatives themselves (Divercity, 2021).

Moreover, existing collaborative housing examples are scattered and largely for the more affluent (Scheller & Thörn, 2018). Still, Sweden is teeming with nascent initiatives for collaborative housing at different levels of maturity, and it is high time to shift our focus toward implementation and upscaling.

In that context, it is interesting to consider whether co-design and building can help make collaborative housing more affordable. This is a research area with few existing scientific articles and those that do exist mainly examine this approach in developing countries.

There are exceptions, and they often concern the UK. For instance, Heslop (2021) described an experiment in which participatory action research was used as a method to overcome power inequalities in the design process and where joint learning was crucial.

Important to the origin of the concept of co-design is the Austrian architect Christopher Alexander and his US-based colleagues, who developed a ‘pattern language’ for design and applied it in many different contexts (Alexander et al., 1977a, 1977b). Although pattern language is well known and has great potential to tackle wicked problems such as the climate crisis, few researchers have analyzed the design theories and applied them in the present time (Ricaud et al., 2021).

There are some studies aimed at instrumental learning and streamlining of the design process, e.g., pattern-based coding engines (Bukovszki et al., 2021), but not many modern studies examining how co-design done with laypeople in the Western world work and the potential for such bottom-up driven housing.

The most interesting article in this regard comes from the Danish design researcher Galle, who studied Alexander’s thoughts on beauty and delved into pattern language as a design theory (Galle, 2020). His theoretical analysis leads to the development of definitions and concepts, but at the same time he thinks that ”theories full-blown and mature science of architecture (or indeed design) is not yet available” (Galle, 2020:370).