Infrastructures of caring futures in Collaborative Housing (CH): lessons from an international exchange – Collaborative housing and innovation in care (CHIC)

On 6 June 2023, the CHIC team held a day-long event in Barcelona focusing on European research, practice and lived experience at the intersections of collaborative housing (CH1), innovative care practices and ageing. By bringing different country contexts and sectors together, our goal was to improve our understanding of ideas and practices of care during the life course and ageing processes that are infusing spaces of cohabitation; as well as to consider how research, policy and practice may better reflect and respond to these realities. Below, we offer a brief summary of the key ideas discussed during researcher, practitioner and policy presentations.

Researcher views

The first two sessions of the day explored various research approaches to the interrelated realms of collaborative housing, ageing and social care. Practices, concepts and perspectives were raised from researchers in France, Catalunya, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and the UK.

Across the presentations, there was common agreement that top-down, medicalised models of care are increasingly failing to meet the needs of ageing and more diverse populations: alternatives are needed. How collaborative communities can better meet the changing needs of their members was one of the primary themes of the presentations, with a wealth of positive findings and proposals, but also a recognition of the many challenges.

A focus on the perceptions and motivations of ageing, family relations and gender helped researchers to pick apart the relations and limits of care within communities. In all countries represented, cultural expectations remain that family members – usually women – will take on caring roles (albeit in differing contexts) but that those without this option are excluded from the discussion and from possibilities around care. Caregiving as a practice was thus reimagined as an action of solidarity that works outside of familial or professional help models, in the process questioning traditional gendered as well as intergenerational dynamics.

Several of the presenters dug deeper into the nature of care relationships in collaborative communities as being profoundly different from the transactional care of top-down systems of ‘care givers’ and ‘care recipients’; rather, that caring within such communities involves everyone. These relationships were further explored in research that found support often going beyond limits initially agreed by groups, to even touch on personal care. But a more subtle form of care also constituted a brokerage role, with members advocating on behalf of another between a complexity of relationships with health services, families and others.

A further central theme was how to address inequalities in the different collaborative models, including a challenge to the cultural framing of cohousing as a ‘white space’. While it was clear that the support of schemes with long-term, committed public funding is essential (and discussed in subsequent sessions), one response was the need firstly to recognise that cultural and socio-economic differences do exist, and to allow time and space for these to be negotiated. Further, there is a need to recognise and support the different experiences of migrant and other minority groups, building on their own knowledge and cultural and spatial practices of care.

The question of how to keep people living longer within groups was also addressed – through collaborative housing both as a preventative environment and ‘staying young’ (I.e. responsive to ‘third age’ needs) but also a more supportive environment as members age and their needs change.

Finally, there was an emerging appreciation of the differences between the countries represented, in terms of levels of care provided, care systems, and cultural expectations of family support.

Practitioner perspectives

In the second part of the day a panel of expert practitioners presented their perspectives and experiences regarding the state and possible futures of collaborative housing, care and ageing in Spain, Catalunya and England. All agreed on the idea—applied through a range of contextual practices—of scaling up and expanding the collaborative housing sector with attention to care and ageing built in from the beginning. Indeed, the growth of these alternative models in recent years has been evident, though certainly much greater in scale and speed in the Spanish context than in England. While Catalunya has been at the forefront of developing a cooperative cohousing movement that works against the commodification of housing within the broader framework of the right to housing, the UK is now beginning to address ‘the market failure of all types of housing for older people’ by considering a range of innovative provision from both the alternative, collaborative housing sector and commercial enterprises. In Barcelona, Yabel Pérez spoke about the critical role that cooperative organisations like Sostre Civic have played over the last decade in strengthening and expanding affordable collaborative options for both intergenerational and senior groups.

A common theme revolved around the de-institutionalisation of care—the notion that care should not be a business. This was particularly important to stress when considering the reality of multiple crises of housing and care, alongside the demographic challenges of an ageing population.

Practices of self-management and autonomy in decision-making were noted as central to the agenda of de-institutionalisation. This does not mean moving away from the support of the State, but rather individuals and their groups thinking together about how to best combine the range of relevant existing public and local care provisioning with their own systems of mutual aid and/or cooperative finances.

There was a common terminology used around the need to strengthen, build or develop so-called ‘eco-systems’, ‘infrastructures’ or ‘networks’ of care and/with collaborative housing. For Mayte Sancho Castello, an international expert in gerontological planning, this would involve a distributed, territorial model based in small localities where individuals can access all their needs, including day centres and home-care services. For Owen Jarvis (CEO, UK Cohousing Network) and Jeremy Porteus (Director, Housing LIN), it was more about improving the efficiency of social care systems with citizens driving the change.

Workshops

After lunch, three parallel workshops were held with members of at least 10 different CH groups to address particular issues that have emerged over the course of the CHIC research as relevant to the intersections of ageing, care and collaborative housing. These were: intersectionality (of needs and identities), designing for care and financing care in community.

Public Policy Priorities

In the final session of the day, we heard from three public officials about Public policy priorities at the intersections of CH, ageing and care—and specifically how the city of Barcelona is approaching, and evaluating, collaborative housing and accommodation for older people. The three presenters spoke about how housing was being variously approached with strong consideration of care in older age, affordability and health.

The Head of the Department for Ageing of Barcelona Council, Ester Quintana Escarrà, argued social housing with lifetime tenure security has grown in the last 20 years, and that within those, residents are encouraged to offer mutual help. To expand the offer, they are now considering the option of small, shared homes in existing buildings.

The strongest tendency we heard about, from Javier Burón, Director of Housing for the city of Barcelona, has been the support and expansion of the cooperative and collaborative housing sector through their model for cohousing (cohabitatge in Catalan), which forms part of the city’s overall housing policy, which targets a mix of 1/3 public, 1/3 private and 1/3 cooperative or communitarian – along the model of Vienna. The model is in its early days, with only 150 households living in such homes so far.

Known as ‘right to use’ housing, the municipality gives city-owned land to non-profit cooperatives on a 99-year lease (the maximum permitted) in exchange for a nominal fee, while the non-profit coop builds and manages the housing. Residents must meet the same requirements as for owner-occupied social housing (viviendas de protección oficial), purchase a right to use the homes in collective ownership understanding that while they can sell their occupancy rights to others who meet the criteria, units cannot be resold on the open market.

Ana Novoa, Senior Public Health Technician in Barcelona’s Public Health Agency evaluated (with her team) the impact of Catalunya’s growing cooperative housing model on health. Although their research was not limited to schemes for older people, many of its findings strongly echo those of the CHIC project. Key ones are around the way in which CH could contribute to greater mental and physical wellbeing amongst residents. Stability of tenure offered residents a sense of security, as did low rents. The emphasis on community life, mutual support and shared values helped create a sense of belonging and reduced loneliness, and communal spaces fostered social interaction as well as healthy physical activity. Self-management created pride, a sense of belonging and purpose, and a sense of control. But it also demanded significant time, and conflicts over decisions or policies could arise, leading to fatigue and stress.

Because collaborative schemes were generally built to high environmental standards, Novoa said, they usually had lower energy costs and better thermal comfort than conventional homes. On the other hand, their relatively high cost often made them unaffordable for lower-income people; even people involved in schemes from the start were forced to drop out because the final costs were higher than anticipated.

Detailed summary of individual contributions

Research approaches

Jim Hudson began the day by presenting early findings from the UK’s ‘Collaborative Housing and Innovative Practice in Social Care’ project [CHIC]– a three-year research, funded by the NIHR, and designed to answer the question: in what ways might collaborative housing meet the social care and support needs of older people? To do so, the team has looked at care and mutual support in six collaborative housing communities in England (three cohousing, three ‘others’, including a self-managed retirement development, a self-managed ‘very sheltered’ housing, and an older person’s housing cooperative) over a 30-month period, with in-depth case study research and 100+ interviews, focus groups and other visits. In the cohousing groups, findings suggest that they have strong social organisation through shared activity, resource pooling and housing design; that they present a preventative health and wellbeing role; that they offer mutual support practices that may reduce need for longer hospital stays; and that even though there are agreed limits to mutual support that do not tend to cross the boundary of personal care, in practice they sometimes do, including palliative care. In moments of crisis or ill health, one role that the residents seem to play is that of an advocate or ‘broker’ of relationships with family or other forms of externalised care. In the ‘other’ communities, self-management of buildings, finances and services in turn means control over care: staffing, choice and quality.

The following questions were used to frame the remaining parts of the event: How can the design of collaborative housing accommodate care? What kind of financial models should be considered for social care in collaborative housing over time? And, How can collaborative housing cater to diverse needs and identities of older people?

The participatory research project RAPSoDIA, led by Anne Labit in France, asked ‘Is cohousing a realistic alternative for ageing population?’. She explained how, within the six communities they studied, the alternative experiences of ageing within a “self-made family” were neither individualist nor ageist. The focus on the perceptions and motivations of ageing, family relations and gender helped researchers to pick apart the relations and limits of care. Caregiving itself, as a practice, was reimagined as solidarity actions that worked outside of familial or professional help models. It questioned traditional gendered as well as intergenerational dynamics. At the spatial level, they found that the intermediary dimension inside flats allow for it to be more easily adapted to care needs over time

Daniel López spoke about how, through their national research project MOVICOMA, three dominant cultural ‘waves’ of ageing (ie, one that fears institutionalisation, active ageing, etc.) helped to frame their approach to questions of ageing over time in senior cohousing models. Across a number of spaces, they found that common motivations for engaging with these CH models included “active 3rd age”, “control of ageing”, and “autonomy around anti-ageing”. An important, ongoing challenge for many groups is how to conceive of ‘keeping people’ until the end of life, in community (and how to make this feasible without it becoming an institution), as well as the challenge of ensuring the sustainability of care over time by having, for example a strong and durable social (and possibly, intergenerational) infrastructure.

An-Sofie Smetcoren spoke about the CALICO project in Belgium, which aims to address lack of access to housing for vulnerable groups by creating a pilot project with a development of three cohousing clusters of affordable homes, housing women in precarious situations or who are ageing; an intergenerational solidarity group; and offering affordable housing for low-income families. The schemes are designed around principles and shared spaces and resources that reinforce the autonomy of the residents in need of care and support, and includes spaces and a garden area shared with the wider public. The project has studied the scheme over its first three years, with its first report published this year.

In the next presentation, Sergio García García spoke about three ‘states of care’ in collaborative housing, as evidenced in their discursive and ethnographic study of a cooperative project, a senior cohousing group and a collective parenting project. Their focus on the moral, bodily and emotional dimensions of care for participants looked at how care gets constructed around a morality of obligation. They identified Three States of Care that they identified—gaseous, liquid and solid. Gaseous care focuses more on the emotional, relationship, organizational and management aspects linked to more day-to-day interactions and neigbourliness within the community. Liquid states are more related to interpersonal relations, providing offers and favours, emotional support and being there for each other. Solid states are more closely related to bodily aspects and more intimate relationships with dependent people on activities of daily living and with bodily and emotional afflictions. They imagine solid care like community care. In this more intensive and extensive bonding form, thresholds are sometimes crossed with respect to friendship and usual neighborliness (intimacy, physical effort, modesty, disgust, risk, time required, centrality in the agenda), but where situations are less bearable or more difficult, the community usually gives way to the family, the State and the market.

Joana Lages, from Lisbon, presented her project ‘Care(4) Housing’, which employs a care through design approach to address issues of housing precarity, ageing and (lack of social) care in Portugal. Their approach involves four key dimensions: a spatial rethink of new housing models and typologies; an exploration of the social dynamics of solidarity and collective self-organization; a technical consideration of relations of interdependency; and advocating politically for a feminist ethics of care within the context of a ‘social production of architecture’, bringing the invisible ‘others’ (eg, Cape Verde migrants) to co-design their own path. She noted how in co-housing, which can be culturally framed as a “White space” (Anderson 2015), it is important to better service low-income migrant communities based on their existing knowledge, values (eg, intergenerational respect) and spatial practices of care.

Practitioner perspectives

A panel of expert practitioners presented their perspectives and experiences regarding the state and possible futures of collaborative housing, care and ageing in Spain, Catalunya and England.

Mayte Sancho Castello, an international expert in Gerontological Planning, spoke about the continued importance of focusing on the de-institutionalisation of housing for older people and the centrality of autonomy as a concept that underlies all collaborative housing alternatives. In Spain, however, the extent to which individuals and groups may hope to achieve such autonomy is regionally unequal, as it depends largely on the varying levels of public financial support offered to an individual by different autonomous communities (eg, this can range between EUR1000/month in some localities and EUR300/Month in others). Sancho stressed the need to speak not just about the care that takes place in community, but about a larger ecosystem of care, or ‘friendly environment’: a distributed, territorial model based in small localities where individuals can access all their needs, including day centres, home-care services, General Practitioners, pharmacies, neighbours, voluntary associations and community environments. She argued that alternative housing communities already have the sensibilities through which to coproduce and socialise co-responsibility for developing such friendly environments, but that in order to do so they should remain as flexible as possible in their approaches (ie, the less rules and norms, the better) and that they should recognise their state of continuous production (ie, that they are never fully finalised projects, but in constant growth and flux).

The Director of the UK Cohousing Network, Owen Jarvis, focused on the growth of this niche movement in the UK, where options for cohousing and healthy ageing include senior, intergenerational and housing-association led cohousing. At the moment, there are twenty-five coho schemes, and another twenty-five coming through in the next five years. Despite its niche status, the government is becoming more interested in the range of choices it can offer older people. Owen asked that while these are, on the main, extraordinary people doing extraordinary things, ‘how can we get to the ordinary people doing this as ordinary. How do we make it adaptable?’ One way is to think about existing schemes in ways that can be reassembled, as well as moving away from thinking about individual housing schemes and more towards a flourishing ecosystem. He mentioned six challenges to developing and expanding the sector, that the UKCHN is focusing on: planning and policy frameworks, land, awareness, investment and funding, community skills and expertise (particularly in development). They are currently engaged in two projects: one with CLT Network called ‘Collaborative Housing Growth Lab’ where they are thinking like designers, taking promising projects through a double diamond process to help scale up promising ideas; and another which is about embedding collaborative housing into existing mainstream developments that are already getting built.

Yabel Pérez from Sostre Civic emphasised the importance of housing and care not as a business but as a supportive process focussed on the individual. The organisation is an umbrella cooperative that over the last decade has played a critical role in strengthening and expanding affordable collaborative options for both intergenerational and senior groups; Sostre Civic serves the different co-operative schemes but each is independently self-managed by its members, including its own finances. The various schemes supported include several recent and ongoing senior cohousing schemes, with details presented of Walden XXI (previously a disused hotel building), Can 70 (in development using land granted under ‘right to use’ by the Barcelona municipality) and Solterra (who bought and converted an old hotel in rural Catalunya).

Jeremy Porteus, Chief Executive at the Housing LIN, started off by stating that in the last 10 years, many high-level reports have recognised the political indecision and lack of preparation for the market failure of all types of housing for older people in the UK. But how do we move radically from the evolution of a dependency led model of care and housing, to the revolution that we really need, or from a model of welfare to wellbeing, with the new demographic challenges we face? In their programme ‘CollaborAge’, Housing LIN is looking at a variety of different solutions across ages, where housing care can be better integrated in a range of settings, including cohousing. It also includes a model where outcome-based wellbeing is promoted. This is about both personal wellbeing and system efficiency (the ecosystem) — about more choice and control over options in later life, and codesigning that with people (citizen-led commissioning). With such asset-based community development, the focus is on frameworks for partnership working. Jeremy is involved in a new government task force into senior housing that is looking into historically problematic areas like attitudes to later housing, outdated planning law and housing undersupply. To move away from the current dominant deficit model of ageing, considerations of ways forward include looking at new approaches to technology, innovative products, diversity and broader options like cohousing, with both social and commercial opportunities.

Workshop themes

After lunch, three parallel workshops were held to address particular issues that have emerged over the course of the CHIC research as relevant to the intersections of ageing, care and collaborative housing. These are: intersectionality (of needs and identities), design and finance. Below is an outline of the questions raised and discussed in eahc with representatives from at least 10 cohousing groups:

In Workshop 1, on intersectionality (led by Marta Pi), the following questions were asked:

Who does the caring (for older people) in CH and what levels and types of care practices are involved or mobilised?
How can/should care for diverse needs and identities be organised and/or supported in CH?

How can care be organised more collectively in CH?

In Workshop 2, on designing for care in the community, (led by Col.lectiu Punt 6), these questions guided the group:

What is ´good’ design (social & material) for care and support of ageing adults (think about both individual and collective/ community levels)?
What types of housing, spaces, technology and design features facilitate ageing in a community?
What are the challenges associated to designing for social care in CH?

In Workshop 3 (led by Melissa Fernández), on financing community care, these questions were addressed:

How is (or can) care (informal or formal services) financed in CH? Is it viable?
What are the collective challenges for supporting long-term care needs of community members?
What financial trade-offs (or decisions) are necessary when considering care needs vis a vis other community needs?

Public policy priorities

Ester Quintana Escarrà, Head of the Department for Ageing of Barcelona Council, said the city had over the last 20 years built 1400 homes for older people who meet the criteria for social housing. Residents of these buildings have lifetime tenure security as long as they remain in good mental and physical health. The buildings are professionally managed, have concierges, and offer home care. While the schemes are not collaborative, they do encourage residents to offer mutual help. Given the marked shortage of homes for older people, the city was now looking at creating small shared homes (unidades de convivencia) in existing buildings; these homes would accommodate 10-12 people who needed care.

We heard next from Ana Novoa, Senior Public Health Technician in Barcelona’s Public Health Agency. Her team is evaluating the impact of Catalunya’s growing cooperative housing model (described in more detail by Javier Burón, below) on health. Although their research was not limited to schemes for older people, many of its findings strongly echo those of the CHIC project.

Novoa said collaborative housing could contribute to greater mental and physical wellbeing amongst residents. Stability of tenure offered residents a sense of security, as did low rents. The emphasis on community life, mutual support and shared values helped create a sense of belonging and reduced loneliness, and communal spaces fostered social interaction as well as healthy physical activity. These schemes differed from traditional housing for older people in that they were managed by residents themselves. This responsibility created pride, a sense of belonging and purpose, and a sense of control. But self-management was not an unalloyed positive: it also demanded significant time, and conflicts over decisions or policies could arise, leading to fatigue and stress. To date, Novoa observed, there had been little research comparing these two models.

Novoa stressed the importance of social and political context, observing that in societies with a strong culture of cooperativism and a lot of experience with collaborative models, such schemes were easier to put into practice.

Finally we heard from Javier Burón, Director of Housing for the city of Barcelona, who described the features of the Barcelona model for cohousing (cohabitatge in Catalan). This is one strand of the city’s overall housing policy, which targets a mix of 1/3 public, 1/3 private and 1/3 cooperative or communitarian – along the model of Vienna.

Technically, Barcelona’s cohousing is known as ‘right to use’ housing. The model has much in common with community land trusts. The municipality gives city-owned land to non-profit cooperatives on a 99-year lease (the maximum permitted) in exchange for a nominal fee. This virtually free land, itself a major financial boost, is supplemented by grant, tax incentives and loans from a state bank, which are guaranteed by the city.

The role of the non-profit coop is to build and manage the housing. Residents must meet the same requirements as for owner-occupied social housing (viviendas de protección oficial): they must live in Barcelona, cannot own a home already, and must have an income below €53,000. They purchase a right to use the homes: as is typical for coops, ownership is collective, but the use of dwellings is individual. Those who move on can sell their occupancy rights to others who meet the criteria but units cannot be resold on the open market.

The model is in its early days, with only 150 households living in such homes so far. Two pilot schemes (one new, one rehab) were built in 2014 and 2015 on the basis of competitive tenders, and one of them (La Borda) has won a number of architectural prizes. Baron said the competitive tender process took a lot of time, forced competition on organisations with a cooperative ethos, and led to resentment and even litigation. The city has since modified its approach. It now has framework agreements with three non-profit associations already active in the housing sector. Each has been given land for 100 homes, as well as grant funding and a public guarantee, and these associations are responsible for choosing the specific proposals to take forward. Barcelona’s first senior cohousing project, CAN 70, which we heard about earlier in the day, is now under development.