Since the 2000s many European countries have seen the re-emergence of a range of collective self-organized and participatory forms of housing provision. These include resident-led cooperatives, cohousing, Community Land Trusts (CLTs), and different types of community self-help and self-build housing initiatives. While the idea of collective self-organization in housing has a long tradition, this recent wave of housing initiatives features new aspects, and aims to address pressing issues in today’s society. The latter include, amongst others, concerns for wider social inclusion and cohesion as well as affordability and higher environmental sustainability standards. In this Special Issue (SI), we refer to these types of housing practices in terms of “collaborative housing”. Collaborative housing (CH) has been adopted by many researchers and practitioners over the last decades as an umbrella term to encompass the wide variety that these forms of housing can take. The term suggests that collaboration among residents as well as between a community of residents and external stakeholders in housing provision represents one core aspect of all different models (Vestbro 2010; Fromm 2012).

Although this SI deliberately focuses on European debates, CH is a global phenomenon. Over the last decade, grassroots activity and international exchange in this field have increased, and the number and breadth of research and publications is rapidly growing. Nevertheless, European research – and also knowledge transfer between Europe and other parts of the world – on these housing models are still weakly connected despite a few notable efforts. The latter include the first International Conference on Collaborative Housing, which took place in Stockholm in 2010; three SIs in academic journals (Built Environment 38/3, 2012; and 45/3, 2019; Urban Research & Practice 8/1, 2015; and the International Journal of Housing Policy, 18/1, 2018) and the formation of a working group on collaborative housing within the European Network for Housing Research (ENHR) in 2016.