Cohousing: shared futures

It is widely recognised that the UK housing market is dysfunctional. The problems are not limited to affordability and the mismatch between supply and demand. Equally important are the kinds of new housing produced by the speculative volume building model, and the communities and neighbourhoods that result. In the real world, the quantity, quality, location, density and price of housing are intimately bound up with how people live and relate to their neighbours and the resources that their homes consume. Cohousing could play a key role in solving the crisis. Cohousing usually includes private individual or family homes, which may be owned or rented, clustered around spaces and facilities that are collectively used. Food is often a focus, with community food production and/or a common house for shared meals. The communities generally have non-hierarchical structures and decision-making processes, and are usually designed, planned and managed by the residents. Our recent ESRC action research programme2 focused on cohousing in the UK today: what works, what are the barriers to wider adoption, and what questions still need to be answered? Over the course of a two-year series of seminars and site visits our group met together with cohousing practitioners, activists and other academics from the UK and abroad.