Architecture & The Built Environment
This thesis examines the rise of co-housing in Europe as a response to urban housing challenges and energy transition. It highlights the significance of resident-led initiatives in sustainable urban development, emphasizing their potential as niche innovators in energy-efficient housing. The research integrates social practices, institutional contexts, and technological considerations, proposing that co-housing can enhance collaboration between residents and engineers to achieve sustainable living environments and promote energy transition.
2023
Relevance: self-organisation and energy transition
Following the UN world summits on Climate Change (Paris 2015) and Habitat (Quito 2016), most European cities assume an active role to implement internationally agreed goals related to climate change, translated in the so-called New Urban Agenda. At the same time, the urban housing market is increasingly inaccessible for low- and middle-income households. To overcome problems such as failing housing supply and high energy-bills, groups of residents take initiatives to create and manage housing projects collectively; these initiatives are further indicated as ‘co-housing’. Each project forms a specific constellation of organisational, functional and design features, but
all are characterised by self-organisation, mixed uses and spaces for sharing activities or devices. The aim of this study is to create deeper understanding of the current rise of co-housing in Europe, and what it could mean in urban policies addressing energy transition and climate change. Studying co-housing is timely because the residents’ associations become ‘prosumers’; uniting the supply (production) and demand (consumption) of energy, housing and services in their projects. As such, they are increasingly seen as partners in the co-creation and maintenance of urban space.
However, attention for co-housing design and engineering has been limited, which may be due to the relatively small numbers of initiatives and consequently their perceived small impact. Notwithstanding small figures, there are two domains where co-housing can become an important asset for urban development: design and maintenance of (semi-)public space for climate change mitigation, and the transition to a circular metabolism in housing. Based on empirical data, this thesis concludes that co-housing projects present relevant models and approaches for reducing the energy consumption and for integrating renewable energies in the general housing stock. Engineers can learn from co-housing pioneers to advance the targets for energy-transition and further develop sustainable cities.
Framework: Residents, engineers and institutions
The conceptualisation of co-housing in research is moving away from uncritical advocacy and perceiving single projects as ‘ideal’ models. The thesis contributes to the emerging body of knowledge with a new understanding of co-housing, analysing its ‘key-features’ with an interdisciplinary framework, in a European context. It adds
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a new perspective to existing co-housing research, which is dominated by social sciences, by drawing attention to the physical characteristics of co-housing, produced in architectural, planning and engineering processes (the technosphere). The active residents can be seen as niche innovatiors regarding these processes. How co-housing design and engineering is shaped by the continuous dialectic between (micro-) actors and ‘systems’, in this case residents’ initiatives and housing and energy provision, is the key question of this research. The thesis proposes a contextual reading of the projects and their discourse, which incorporates the institutional and technical contexts. Both are necessary to understand the renewable energy sources and energy engineering found in the projects. The choices made during design and building are not only shaped by the residents’ aims and perception of sustainability, but also influenced by technosphere-related institutions, such as the building-components industry, energy or waste networks and providers, and planning regulations. The professional partners for the projects, such as housing associations and engineers, are equally affected by the institutional context, but their position is different from that of residents. They may for example be more anchored in governmental or professional regulations.
To structure this dynamic, the research distinguishes three interrelated aspects:
– ACTORS / involved in the (realisation of) projects: social practices of residents and their professional partners in co-creation.
– CONTEXT / the structural forces surrounding the projects, specifically the macro- institutional regimes. This also includes culturally determined interpretations of sustainability, technology, participation, societal roles, sharing, and so on.
– TECHNOSPHERE / specifically building technology and utilities, focussing on energy- related design and engineering of the co-housing projects.
Methods: empirical basis
The thesis is primarily based on qualitative methods, as it found that reliable quantitative data are as yet unavailable. Looking for effective low-impact energy- solution in co-housing, quantitative data remain however necessary and this thesis elaborates on pitfalls and possibilities for their accumulation.
Empirical material from Dutch case-studies form the core of the research (appendix). Examples were also taken from countries where the re-emergence of co-housing is most visible and articulate: Belgium, France, Germany, the UK and Zwitserland.
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Previously informed by professional experience, planning documents were used as a heuristic device, verified through semi-structured interviews and project visits. The empirical material together with the literature survey resulted amongst others in identifying research gaps. From this basis a number of thematic studies was developed, and reported in peer-reviewed publications.
Analyses of national policy documents and programme evaluation reports enabled benchmarking of co-housing related to the general state of the art of energy-efficient housing in the Netherlands. Next to shaping the different generations of resident-led housing of which cases were selected, it also made visible that co-housing initiatives are proportionally over-represented in public programs which stimulate energy- efficient and sustainable building. This phenomenon was also found in other European countries, confirming that co-housing initiatives can be seen as niche innovators
in energy-transition. International comparison was further used to identify specific characteristics and design features of the initiatives, and distinguish them from generic housing design shaped by national Building Acts and building conventions.
Findings: niche innovators in urban space and energy
What has become very clear in this research is the impact of the institutional environment on the design of co-housing projects, through requirements for obtaining a building permit, local housing allocation procedures, spatial development priorities and subsidies. The structural institutional forces that shape as well as limit co-housing initiatives in practice have been identified in the national planning regimes; local government and urban development policies play prominent roles. The research found that this influence is reciprocal, for example: In the Dutch case, residents’ initiatives had an impact on the housing market, which now has a more customised offer, resulting in what this thesis calls ‘hybrid forms’ of co-housing (categorised in chapter 7). In other countries, co-housing networks influence the Housing Act (France), housing policies (Belgium), housing typology (Switzerland) or energy standards (Germany). Co-housing has thus become a transformative practice in unexpected ways.
The interviews revealed that planners and real estate developers tend to emphasise the challenges of resident involvement in planning and design, seeing it as too unstable, short-term, short-sighted and small-scale oriented. The case-studies contradict these views: most realised projects are long-lived and continue with sustainable practices.
Socio-legal research demonstrated how strongly institutionally embedded concepts such as private property and the private sphere have been challenged by co-housing. For co-housing design and engineering this affects, for example, the shared spaces
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and infrastructure which distinguish co-housing from gated communities and condominiums. A major quality of co-housing is its common or semi-public outdoor spaces, such as clustered parking, playgrounds and gardens. These areas contribute to urban quality for example in heat-stress reduction, facilitating encounters between neighbours and the development of children. Together with the common build volume, they also provide space for the application of environmental technologies, such as water recycling or purification, and solar energy.
Based on the fieldwork, this thesis concludes that there are further innovations possible in co-housing to advance the targets for energy-transition. Due to the technological character of these opportunities, engineers should play a significant role in this exploration and the co-creation of new low-impact residential models.
Conclusions: engineers and residents between grid and project
In the cases studied, the applied environmental technologies are as such not innovative, because residents’ associations cannot afford research and development nor take financial risks. However, the way the technologies are decided and maintenaned in resident-led processes, opens a new perspective for the engineering of residential clusters. The self-steering in co-housing enables fine-tuning of the selection and maintenance of building materials, climate devices and comfort requirements, which together can have considerable impact on energy consumption.
Moreover, from an engineering perspective, clustered housing offers additional possibilities to successfully implement sustainable energy systems and local water recycling. The intermediate level of a cluster allows for short cycles (partial autarky) for some flows, such as rainwater. This is relevant for co-housing, but also for urban housing, which calls for grid-related solutions that need to connect to (future) smart grids for decentralised energy production. Through intermediate grids, such as micro-heat networks and solar power circuits, new technical options for buffering, cascading and peak shaving can be applied. In this way, the co-housing cluster mediates between source,
grid and user on a scale that is not only overseeable in its spatial and administrative dimensions, but also allows the integration of production and use of urban flows.
A key-issue for both urban planners and utility engineers is to find collaborative design methods to secure efficient or ‘low-impact’ (energy-)flows from building to grid level. Co-creation also require the institutional empowering of co-housing residents to collectively act as ‘client’, which is not common in the current European regulatory frameworks and (local) markets. Under such conditions, co-housing offers a rich test- ground for new, combined applications of sustainable technologies.
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https://ec.europa.eu/energy/en/topics/technology-and-innovation/strategic-energy-technology-plan
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Summary
Under the present institutional conditions, co-housing initiatives need to mobilise considerable social and cultural capital to survive the planning trajectory, during which ambitions for social resilience and inclusiveness often erode. Under such circumstances, the upscaling of resident-led housing can result in urban fragmentation, and a further segregation in access to affordable and low carbon energy sources and housing. This contradicts the sustainable models of housing and urban development called for by the European Union member-states in the New Urban Agenda. In order to integrate the principles underlined in this agenda and European regulatory frameworks into the grain of the planning and engineering professions, it is necessary to integrate housing policies with technological policies such as presented in the European Strategic Energy Technology Plan (SET-Plan2) 2015-2020.
Co-housing continues to develop and gain experiences with competences, such as communication skills and the ability to work cross-disciplinarily. The building industry and engineering professions increasingly call for such capabilities, but resident-led urban development have not yet entered the urbanism and engineering curricula. Therefor, opportunities should be provided for future professionals not only to acquire such capabilities but also to address fundamental questions related to resident- involvement and democracy. This will enable future professionals to create a balance between ‘bottom-up’ articulated needs on the quality of living environments with large-scale investments in new urban energy, mobility and mutual care networks.