Tackling Housing Deficits from a Multi-Dimensional Perspective: The Potential of Collaborative Housing in the Chilean Context

Abstract

After decades of battling quantitative and qualitative housing deficits, countries in Latin America are seeing new types of challenges in housing and neighbourhoods, namely the weakening of social trust, solidarity between neighbours and networks of mutual help. The region has a long history of self-help approaches in housing, which have proved instrumental to provide housing and also to help build strong social ties between neighbours. However, decades of neoliberal policies favouring individual (low-cost) home-ownership, combined with land liberalisation and the ensuing socio-spatial segregation, have resulted in weakened self-organisation capacities amongst residents. A case in point is Chile, where families are located in peripheral areas of the city, as a consequence of the granting of subsidies and plans to eradicate informal housing. This has resulted in the loss of social capital, breakdown of the family and social networks and solidarity systems between neighbours. Recently, international research proposes a re-conceptualization of collective self-organised and self-managed housing alternatives, under the umbrella term “collaborative housing” (CH), where local communities collectively produce their housing in collaboration with a variety of stakeholders. This paper explores the opportunities and limitations of CH forms to address the housing deficits from a multi-dimensional perspective, with a special focus on what we term housing “social” deficits. We do so through a systematic literature review, in two parts: first, we focus on the definition of housing deficits in the literature, namely: urban, quantitative, qualitative, and social. Secondly, we look at the literature on the potential of various CH forms to address the housing deficits across these different dimensions. The article concludes by proposing a definition of social deficits in housing and puts forward a set of propositions on the potential of CH to tackle these deficits, with a focus on the Chilean housing context.