Aotearoa Collective Housing
“When it comes to housing, there is always the question of where to draw the line between what is private and what is public or semi-public”.
A History of Collective Living: Forms of Shared Living, Schmid, Eberle & Hugentobler, 2019.
Welcome:
Welcome to the homepage of EACH. This page is where you will find important information about this project, key resources, and quotes. Further content is on the following pages:
Information about collective housing projects and communities can be found under the Projects tab.
Information about various important topics related to collective housing can be found under the Opportunities and Challenges tabs.
Further resources can be accessed through the Resource Library.
About:
This website is the result of a collaboration between The Housing Innovation Society and Victoria University Wellington School of Architecture. It is intended to help strengthen, inform and inspire collective housing conversations and action in Aotearoa New Zealand. While in papakāinga we have an internationally significant collective housing taonga, by world standards, our wider collective housing community is emergent and has much to learn. There are many challenges the sector faces including regulatory, design, finance, and community-building coordination required to create more diverse and community-based housing outcomes. The motivation for this research was to enable more Aotearoa collective housing development by helping to inform and facilitate collective action, political will, innovative capital and shared knowledge.
Research Context:
This resource was produced as part of a research scholarship titled Enabling Aotearoa Collective Housing during the 2022-2023 summer. It was led by Mark Southcombe and Bronwen Newton with research, development, and technical support from Lochlan Dickie. The scholarship funding from THIS and VUW is acknowledged and has achieved as much as possible in the ten weeks available. The information was to the best of our knowledge, correct and up to date at the time of writing but its basis was limited by inability to directly consult many stakeholders in the time available. The research is focused on the local but also includes key international reference material. It builds a new database, and integrates information from several organisations and individuals, including the VUW and THIS teams previous research. It also integrates the database of the UK Collective Custom Build Project by the University of Sheffield and Sam Brown and Cany Ash. We acknowledge that project as an inspiration and are grateful for the international support for our research.
Key Resources:
This video was produced for a UK based project called Collective Custom Build, which details how collaborative design processes can result in better housing outcomes. Video by Ash Sakula Architects with Sheffield University and Design for Homes, an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project.
In Cohousing for life, architect Robin Allison describes her journey from lonely mother of two in the suburbs to determined driver of the development of New Zealand's first cohousing community. It is a very personal story of a collective endeavour, a heroic journey of despair and triumph, as the obstacles mount and success at times feels far from certain. Cohousing for life is also a distillation of what has been learnt: from formulating and inspiring vision to community governance and decision-making: from community design principles to participatory design processes; from legal and financial structures to reflections on power and leadership.
This book is an in-depth history of collective living from around 1850 until today, identifying three motives for sharing housing - economic, political, and social - and providing detailed analysis of residential projects, which are divided in to nine housing models. Through comparison of the reasons for establishment, different ways of use, evolutionary paths, and more, it becomes easy to visualise the various models and projects throughout their history and until today, demonstrating how shared everyday life, intimacy in housing, and degrees of public access were shaped throughout Europe.
Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities is an in-depth exploration of a uniquely rewarding type of housing which is perfect for anyone who values their independence but longs for more connection with those around them. Written by the award-winning team that wrote the original "cohousing bible" and first brought cohousing to North America, this fully-illustrated manual combines nuts-and-bolts practical considerations and design ideas with extensive case studies of dozens of diverse communities in Europe and North America.
CoHousing Cultures: self-organized, community-oriented and sustainable. Integrating, non-speculative and open to the neighborhood. Innovative projects motivated by a search for ecological, affordable and socially designed homes. This book illustrates a colorful diversity of European examples including a cooperative’s barrier-free renovation of an old school in Berlin, collective housing for the 40+ generation in Stockholm and passive architecture planned by and for immigrants in Brussels. Become active! A contact list offers tips for further research
Issue nine is a special issue on the question of housing in Aotearoa New Zealand. We draw together a range of views on the housing crisis, including decolonising and community engagement perspectives, a call for universal state housing, and investigations of the cooperative housing movement. Also included here are three online only responses to the Covid-19 crisis.
A book on what " Co-housing" and Intentional neighbourhoods are, how they are being developed, and how to develop them.
This book is about the previously unsubstantiated link between 'sustainability' and 'community'. It is based on a ten year investigation of cohousing, a popular new type of housing project that directly addresses both environmental degradation and social disintegration. The book argues that social and environmental sustainability are inexorably linked. Whilst the existence of this link is generally recognised, there is little existing literature that offers empirical evidence to prove it. In doing so, the book uses case study data (including 120 photographs, 50 tables and 30 diagrams) from twelve recent cohousing developments in Canada, the USA, New Zealand, Australia and Japan - concrete examples of working sustainable communities.
This book investigates co-housing as an alternative housing form in relation to sustainable urban development.
Co-housing is often lauded as a more sustainable way of living. The primary aim of this book is to critically explore co-housing in the context of wider social, economic, political and environmental developments. This volume fills a gap in the literature by contextualising co-housing and related housing forms. With focus on Denmark, Sweden, Hamburg and Barcelona, the book presents general analyses of co-housing in these contexts and provides specific discussions of co-housing in relation to local government, urban activism, family life, spatial logics and socio-ecology.
The Cohousing Handbook, a groundbreaking and practical guide to creating cohousing, is a must-have for the growing number of people who want to build a cohousing community. Cohousing offers an end to the isolation of the single-family suburban home. Balancing community and personal privacy, cohousing is a chance to create a modern village in an urban or rural setting. Residents own their own homes and can gather in common areas to share meals and socialize. An increasingly popular form of housing in both Europe and North America, cohousing addresses and alleviates many of the demands and pressures of modern life - everything from daycare to aging at home is easier with the help of your neighbors. The Cohousing Handbook is a guide, a manual, and a source of comfort and inspiration for those who want to create their ideal community. Cohousing is our opportunity to build a better society, one neighborhood at a time.
Berlin is thought of as the city of Urban Pioneers, a place where everything is possible and where space can be taken over and transformed. -Voids and unused spaces waiting to be occupied, old buildings engaged with new program. The self-determined design of space, building, living and working, be it in the form of builder collectives or co-housing (Baugruppen), co-op’s (Genossenschaften), co-working spaces or other project forms, has produced an architectural diversity and quality in Berlin over the last fifteen years that is exemplary. Selfmade City presents the evolving condition in Berlin, including a survey of over 120 projects, an analysis of the qualities and potentials of these projects as well as 50 best-practice case studies. Which contributions are being made in private initiative for the development of the city and what can be achieved in the future? Which methods and strategies are generating added value?
Experimental dwelling forms—CoHousing Cultures—are entering the mainstream. But to what extent are they accessible and affordable for all, including people with more or less money, with or without refugee experience, with or without disabilities? Community- led housing initiatives are already developing diverse, sustainable neighborhoods, driven by civil society and increasingly supported by foundations, cooperatives and municipalities as well as housing companies and developers.
This book contains critical reviews of model projects representing a multifaceted European movement, complemented with photos and drawings. Short texts argue how political and financial conditions can be improved to better realize community housing. Finally, a range of voices offer unconventional and promising strategies.
An understanding of the ways of our tūpuna, coupled with the best of new thinking from New Zealand and abroad, has significant potential for sustainable housing models.
Colonial settlement and the discriminatory policies of successive governments have challenged Māori connections to whenua and kāinga. Today, home ownership rates for Māori are well below the national average and Māori are over-represented in the statistics of substandard housing.
Rebuilding the Kāinga charts the recent resurgence of contemporary papakāinga on whenua Māori. Reframing Māori housing as a Treaty issue, Kake envisions a future where Māori are supported to build businesses and affordable homes on whānau, hapū or Treaty settlement lands. The implications of this approach, Kake writes, are transformative.
Acknowledgements:
Our acknowledgement and thanks to Lochlan Dickie, Architecture Masters student and Summer Scholar. He has worked effectively, efficiently, and tirelessly to pull this together. The site contents and performance are informed by his insights, thoroughness, and technical skills which were invaluable to the project. The project is also thankful for and indebted to the enthusiasm and practical community experience of Bronwen Newton and The Housing Innovation Society committee. We also appreciate Mark Southcombe of Victoria University Wellington for management of the project and substantial contribution of the benefits of years of academic and professional expertise, and of sector knowledge. The project section includes information coordinated through the biannual CoHoHui events, and from Tim Gummers CoHousing New Zealand historic web resource which we acknowledge the value of and support from with thanks.
The structure of the resource is open and inclusive as much as practical. It attempts to connect many different parties and people interested in the possibilities of collective housing. The information here is not intended as the last word, rather a conversation starter and foundation for future more detailed research. Victoria University and The Housing Innovation Society cannot accept liability for its accuracy or content. Visitors who rely on this information do so at their own risk. There is an intention to maintain currency and expand the scope of the content to keep pace with the development of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s collective housing community as much as proves practical with limited resourcing. If you have a new project you would like listed, or to advise about information that is outdated, inaccurate or incomplete, please get in touch hello@thehousinginnovationsociety.com with the references and corrections.