In the Netherlands, as in many European countries, housing has become increasingly commodified, and there are growing disparities amongst the housing situations of different generations. While older people tend to live in spacious homes, young people and families increasingly struggle to find a suitable dwelling. Furthermore, since 2012, the national government has adopted an ‘ageing in place’ approach, encouraging older people to stay in their homes as long as possible and making retirement homes only accessible for those unable to live on their own. Moreover, housing that is suited to the needs of older people is scarce, of poor quality, or unaffordable. Against this backdrop, collaborative housing forms, based on the principles of sharing and collectivity, could offer an attractive alternative for older people who are still fit to live independently and want to live in closer connection to their neighbours. Despite the increased popularity of collaborative housing amongst older people in other European countries, this type of housing is (still) relatively unknown in the Netherlands. It is generally assumed that most Dutch people will not want to live collaboratively if given the choice. This paper explores this assumption through a case study in the Tanthof-Oost neighbourhood in Delft. The study followed a participatory design-led research approach to identify the housing preferences of older residents and their willingness to live in different types of collaborative housing. The paper attests to the potential of collaborative housing for housing and mutual care in old age.

Housing cooperativism in Chile shows a discontinuous trajectory through different arrangements between the State, the market, and civil society. Since the mid twentieth century, cooperatives and self-organised housing developed alongside each other. While cooperatives for waged workers were supported by the government, a self-managed housing movement grew amongst the popular classes. The Military Dictatorship and its neoliberal reforms from 1973–1989 meant the demobilization of both groups and the fracture of the existing knowledge of self-organisation and cooperativism in housing. Despite this rupture, since the 2000s, cooperatives are re-emerging thanks to renewed links with Latin-American cooperativism and government’s support to self-management. From a historical perspective, we examine the main challenges faced by the re-emerging cooperatives amidst a persistent neoliberal policy environment. Our theoretical lens combines cooperative value-orientations with examples of agency in the new cooperatives. We conclude that the future of housing cooperativism in Chile depends on its positioning between ‘pragmatic’ and ‘reformist’ values to align with their environment.

Society is facing urgent crises, such as climate change and housing shortages, which increase feelings of uncertainty and distrust towards the government. Many citizens feel powerless and feel a loss of control over their living environment. At the same time, we see a growing movement of self-organisation, in which citizen collectives take responsibility for local challenges in areas such as energy, healthcare and housing. Citizen collectives offer unique solutions through their focus on shared values, sustainability and decentralised decision-making. However, cooperation with governments is often difficult, due to differences in goals and working methods, because the specific institutional logic is not recognised. They are considered ‘hybrid’ organisations, somewhere between market and government, but are neither one nor the other. This article investigates how citizen collectives and governments can collaborate more effectively when this institutional logic and the roles that citizen collectives can play are better known. It also discusses the conditions that are needed to make these initiatives more inclusive and representative. The aim is to harness the power of citizen collectives for necessary societal transitions and the restoration of trust in democratic processes.

Much of the building stock subjected to the upcoming European Renovation Wave is neither listed as heritage nor considered valuable architecture. This also applies to Dutch housing built between 1965 and 1985, more than 30% of the Dutch housing stock, for which there is no consensus on their cultural significance. Their successful renovation process requires broad support. What attributes do citizens consider significant in their neighbourhood? How do we include a multitude of stakeholders? And can digital methods help collect and process responses? This article reveals significant attributes of residential neighbourhoods from 1965 to 1985, assessed by various stakeholders with a digital tool based on case studies in Amsterdam and Almere. A mobile application allowed individuals to identify significant attributes at various scales while visiting the neighbourhood. By qualitative data analysis of survey and interview results, groups of tangible and intangible attributes were deduced. Results show that identifying attributes by current stakeholders broadens existing expert-led assessments on 1965–1985 neighbourhoods by including, for example, generic attributes not originally intended by the designers. Asking open-ended questions is considered essential to identify undiscovered attributes by alternative stakeholders, although dealing with large numbers of responses is recognised as a challenge to cluster and classify. Lastly, the mobile application appears to be a useful digital tool, but integrating scientific consistency and usability is recommended for further development. Engaging multiple stakeholders with such mobile applications allows for collecting opinions, anticipating conflicts, or shared interests between stakeholders and integration into renovation designs. It can empower citizens to preserve the neighbourhood attributes that are most significant to them.

In recent decades, various programs have been developed as part of Chile’s housing policies to respond to the housing deficit. Most policies have so far focused on addressing the quantitative, qualitative, and urban deficits, neglecting the social dimension of housing. At the same time, the concept of collaborative housing has been referred to as a possible alternative to respond to these social challenges by fostering social cohesion, collaboration, and mutual aid. This article explores how collaborative housing can tackle the social deficit of housing. Here, we conceptualise this deficit as ‘the lack of non-physical or intangible social characteristics given among residents of a project, such as trust, social cohesion, and a sense of community, necessary for housing to be considered adequate.’ We examined the relation between these two concepts by developing a theoretical and empirical study. The first consisted of a theoretical framework and a review of literature on collaborative housing’s response to the social deficit of housing. Second, we interviewed stakeholders from two study cases. We found that residents in both collaborative housing cases perceive an improvement in their social interactions, sociability, trust, and sense of community in their current homes compared to previous homes. Therefore, we conclude that collaborative housing presents opportunities to tackle the social deficit of housing.

Collectief wonen is aan een opmars bezig in Europa, en zeker in Nederland. Te midden van een ongekende wooncrisis zoeken steeds meer mensen naar mogelijkheden om samen met anderen te voorzien in toekomstbestendige huisvesting. Sleutelwoorden daarbij zijn gemeenschapsgericht, duurzaam en betaalbaar. Maar waarom komen deze initiatieven zo moeilijk van de grond? En wat kunnen we leren van andere Europese landen? Welke potentie biedt het transformeren van bestaande gebouwen naar collectieve woonvormen? Dit hoofdstuk geeft voorbeelden van projecten waarbij gebouwen met een niet-residentiele functie zijn omgebouwd naar woonvormen met collectieve kenmerken. Het hoofdstuk onderzoekt de belangrijkste kenmerken, uitdagingen en kansen van deze transformaties door middel van bestaande literatuur en de bespreking van enkele concrete cases.

The dataset, underlying the paper “Do I See What You See?” was selected for the project Nexum: Data 4 Art, organised by 4TU. The art pieces by Kuangyi Xing were exhibited in June 2024 in WORM and in the Dutch Design Week 2024 in Eindhoven.

Collective living is on the rise in the Netherlands. Amid an unprecedented housing crisis, more and more people are turning to collective self-organization to provide community-oriented, sustainable and affordable housing. But why are these initiatives struggling to get off the ground? And what can we learn from other European countries? "Together: Space for Collective Living" is a collection of essays, data and case studies in the Netherlands and other European countries, building on the 2021 Project Together! Knowledge. The book addresses the following questions: what is the relevance of collective living, how can we realize these forms of housing, and who can use what actions to ensure that collective living can contribute to more sustainable cities and regions? The book illustrates the dilemmas and opportunities for a new paradigm about living together in the 21st century.

Although attention for citizen involvement in urban development and heritage management processes is growing, both in practice and in research, the specifics of stakeholders’ interests have been less researched. This paper reveals and discusses the assessment by individuals and groups, to differentiate stakeholders, based on the heritage significance they convey on neighbourhood attributes. Fifty-nine interviews on a Dutch neighbourhood in Amsterdam Zuidoost were analysed integrating quantitative and qualitative methods. Results confirm important differences between and within stakeholder groups regarding their interest in particular attribute categories and scales, indicating the need to further specify stakeholders beyond the commonly used ‘community’ and ‘experts’. The identification of stakeholder interests is important to involve relevant groups in the identification and designation of significant attributes, buildings, and areas and to anticipate potential conflicts or shared interests in neighbourhood renovation processes.

Based on the understanding of the built environment as result of competing claims on space that must be resolved via recognition, fair distribution of burdens and benefits of our human association, respect and care for the planet and just procedures to decide on those claims, Spatial Planning and Strategy is a chair in the Department of Urbanism within the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of the Delft University of Technology, committed to helping create sustainability, resilience and spatial justice through the implementation of the New Urban Agenda, the Paris Climate Agreement and the European New Deal, among other frameworks. This commitment is reflected in activities, events, and courses. We are concerned with knowledge about the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of strategic and urban planning tools – visions, strategies, plans and programmes.

After decades of battling the quantitative and qualitative housing deficits, Latin American countries are seeing new types of challenges in housing. Neoliberal policies favouring individual (low-cost) homeownership have weakened social trust and solidarity between neighbours, and some housing areas face poor urban amenities. An example of this is Chile, where housing policy measures have brought adverse effects such as deteriorating housing quality and the relocation of families to peripheral areas. This has caused the breakdown of family ties, community life, and social cohesion. Although various studies on the housing deficit in Chile have been carried out, these studies have not comprehensively addressed the multiple dimensions of housing. Therefore, this review explores how Chilean housing policies have addressed the housing deficit from four dimensions: quantitative, qualitative, urban, and social. To this end, we reviewed Chilean housing policies and programmes and their response to the housing deficit from the neoliberal period onwards. We found that these policies and interventions have focused on solving the quantitative and, to a lesser extent, qualitative and urban deficits while sparsely addressing the non-physical or intangible social dimension. We conclude this article with recommendations to address the social deficit of housing in future policies.

Building costs play a significant role in determining the affordability of a housing project, and these depend to a large extent on design choices. This paper is based on the premise that collaborative design processes, or co-design, used in collaborative housing (CH) in Europe reduce building costs and consequently increase the affordability of these housing projects. However, research remains scarce on the extent to which CH is an affordable solution from a design perspective compared to affordable mainstream housing (MH), in which no co-design is used. Therefore, this paper aims to fill this knowledge gap by assessing the impact of design choices on building costs in CH and MH. To this end, we developed a simulation model to compare the building costs of CH with MH based on their design choices. Findings indicate that CH represents a more affordable and space-efficient solution when compared to MH, if we look at the building costs per unit. This is because CH provides less expensive units while it includes larger common spaces and extra quality. These results help to refute existing claims about the unaffordability of CH design solutions.

In the last century, the concept of what can be heritage has expanded in definition, opening to everyday architecture and living environments. More recently, the group of stakeholders to be involved in heritage assessment and management has slowly grown, with authorities acknowledging that heritage significance lies in the representation and identification for people and that people could help define it. Studying the significance of everyday residential neighbourhoods and the inclusion of individual responses creates a demand for new methods. Although in heritage studies these methods remain undefined, studies on housing preferences offer starting points for new approaches. This paper presents a significance assessment of an everyday living environment by its residents, from a new heritage perspective. By analysing individual responses, this research discusses more inclusive methods of assessing significance. A neighbourhood in the Dutch town Almere, is used as a case study. Based on a survey in diary format, residents’ appreciation of their living environment is analysed using values-attributes and means-end theory. Results show that assessments of individual residents consist of chains of tangible and intangible attributes. The paper proposes a new analytical model, the ‘Web of Attributes’, which visualizes residents’ responses and reveals the diversity and relations between the attributes best appreciated in a specific living environment. The Web of Attributes can serve as visual reporting in statements of significance, for listed and non-listed neighbourhoods. By combining theories from housing preferences and heritage significance assessment, this novel research explores narrow the gap between the assessments of heritage and everyday neighbourhoods.

Against the increasing commodification of housing, a new kind of housing cooperatives has emerged in Catalonia in the last decade. These cooperatives fall within the wider concept of collaborative housing (CH), i.e. they are collectively self-organised projects based on a collaborative design process, or ‘co-design’. In such a process, residents need to adjust their individual expectations and demands in order to reach a collective set of values to realise their housing project. The aim of this paper is to assess how values are set through co-design and translated into a housing project. To do so, we develop an analytical framework to conduct a longitudinal single case-study that traces back the co-design process of the resident-led housing cooperative La Borda, in Barcelona. Our findings shed light on how co-design unfolds and uncover trade-offs carried out to overcome tensions mostly between individual and collective demands and between building costs and quality.

With the urgency to adapt cities to social and ecological pressures, co-design has become essential to legitimise transformations by involving citizens and other stakeholders in their design processes. Public spaces remain at the heart of this transformation due to their accessibility for citizens and capacity to accommodate urban functions. However, urban landscape design is a complex task for people who are not used to it. Visual collaborative methods (VCMs) are often used to facilitate expression and ideation early in design, offering an arts-based language in which actors can communicate. We developed a co-design process framework to analyse how VCMs contribute to collaboration in urban processes throughout the three commonly distinguished design phases: conceptual, embodiment, and detail. We participated in a co-design process in the Atacama Desert in Chile, adopting an Action Research through Design (ARtD) in planning, undertaking and reflecting in practice. We found that VCMs are useful to facilitate collaboration throughout the process in design cycles. The variety of VCMs used were able to foster co-design in a rather non-participatory context and influenced the design outcomes. The framework recognized co-design trajectories such as the early fuzziness and the ascendent co-design trajectory throughout the process. The co-design process framework aims for conceptual clarification and may be helpful in planning and undertaking such processes in practice. We conclude that urban co-design should be planned and analysed as a long-term process of interwoven collaborative trajectories.

Dutch residential neighbourhoods built after 1965 (Post 65) are characterised by a varied range of housing and living environments. As a reaction to the post-war Reconstruction period, architects and urban designers focussed on quality of life and identification with the living environment. Midrise housing was the compromise between high-rise and low-rise, combining quality and efficiency. Today, Post 65 residential neighbourhoods are not recognised as valuable architecture or cultural heritage. Although academic interest in Post 65 architecture is increasing, attributes of midrise typologies are understudied. Research is necessary to document and assess them, to inform stakeholders and contribute to decision making in renovation processes. The central question in this paper is: What are the urban and architectural attributes (tangible and intangible) of Dutch midrise residential neighbourhoods built after 1965? The paper discusses a comparative analysis of five residential midrise examples, focussing on building typology and visual language. The research applied mixed methods and integrates fieldwork, archival and literature research and uses 2D-matrices, juxtaposing urban and architectural attributes. Results show a variety in terms of typology and use of visual language. Two spatial organisational concepts are identified. A 'snake' shapes the urban space, and creates a front. It refers to a formal urban model in which the urban form is the starting point and the development of the building block a means to that end. A 'mesh' arranges housing units and urban space in a sprawling structure, in which a human scale living environment is the starting point. Regarding visual language, the projects show referencing to various architectural movements. This pluralism applies to the 'collection' of Post 65 midrise complexes but also to single neighbourhoods. The urban and architectural attributes are diverse, with diversity as the common denominator. Following Jencks' definitions, the Post 65 midrise neighbourhoods can therefore be regarded as Post-Modern.

With the increasing social and ecological pressures on urban settlements, re-thinking how we produce them becomes a growing concern. Due to the diversity of actors across sectors and backgrounds involved in such design processes, collaboration is of utmost importance. Co-design can thus play a crucial role in integrating aims and knowledge as an evolving institutional process toward feasible, suitable and legitimate projects. While many studies on co-design focus on one-time activities, little attention is paid to conceptualising how such processes occur, involving several actors in dynamic participatory ways. We propose a Co-Design Framework and suggest that collaboration is achieved at many levels within different design steps in the process. Analysing three Chilean public space co-design processes through the lens of our framework, we highlight the intrinsic diversity of such an approach. This study posits that three co-design arenas interact (strategic, transdisciplinary, and socio-cultural) according to their main aims to enable, inform, and legitimise the projects accordingly. Our framework contributes to conceptualising and analyzing co-design and may also be useful to plan and develop such processes in academia and practice.

To a large extent, established formal participation schemes fail to deliver on their promise of transferring substantial power to tenants, while self-organized housing remains a niche for those who have a strong inclination and ample resources. Given the rise of renting in Europe, and the intensifying housing crisis, increasing tenants’ ontological security by allowing them meaningful influence is urgent and important. Self-management, where tenants take over practical tasks from their housing provider, has the potential to expand the immediate influence of tenants over their direct environment in a more accessible manner than self-organization or formal participation. Yet, knowledge about such self-managed housing is limited and analyses are few. In this article, we present findings from a qualitative case-study of a Dutch project that is managed by its tenants. We conclude that self-management can have added value, but unless it is integrated in formal participation structures, its impact will be limited.

The implementation of adaptation measures and the improvement of urban resilience is a growing concern recently. While urban projects are encouraged to become resilient, there is an interest in the design processes that produce them. In the Latin-American context, co-design is gradually taking a central role in space production, recognizing the need for involving multiple stakeholders to achieve more integrated and inclusive designs. However, in the case of Chile, institutions are rather rigid, over-regulated, and tend to operate in silos. We investigate how the co-design of public spaces can contribute to urban resilience through a case study of two Chilean design processes. The study applies the evolutionary resilience framework (ERF) to assess urban co-design processes (Davoudi et al., Plan Pract Res 28:307–322, 2013). Barriers and enablers reported by the interviewees shed light on how the co-design processes evolved and contributed to, or hindered resilience. Co-design is seen as a preparation-building process towards climate resilience that can be furthered through persisting, adapting, or transforming collaboration and design process factors. This study operationalizes the ERF framework and proposes a flowchart to identify factors influencing urban resilience. Although the Latin-American context may differ from other places, this study provides insights to co-design processes elsewhere.