Self-organised and civil society participation in housing provision

Abstract

After 40 years of relative decline, self-organised and civil society participation in housing has ostensibly been resurgent since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Drawing on evidence from ten countries this Special Issue explores the socio-economic and policy drivers of community land trusts, co-operatives, self-help housing and co-housing within different societal contexts using a variety of analytical frameworks. A key finding is that the GFC alone is not a satisfactory explanation for the resurgence. Social origins and contextual drivers are often deeper, more enduring and vary between national contexts. The term ‘collaborative housing’ is now gaining ground as a generic descriptor – shifting the focus from self-organisation to partnerships with varying degrees of community leadership and benefit. This Special Issue provides a platform for future research at the micro-level of organisations, the meso-level of stakeholder co-production, and the macro-level of welfare regimes. It identifies tools to map co-production relationships between the state, market and civil society stakeholders, to track interventions throughout the policy cycle, and to evaluate values and outcomes throughout organisational lifecycles. Knowledge gaps and limitations that future research should address include the limited evidence on the profile of participants and beneficiaries. A more critically-engaged stance is needed to consider consequences of institutionalisation and scaling-up on social outcomes. Finally, we need to learn from the experience of the Global South where self-provided housing is more dominant.

Keywords:

• self-organised housing
• community-led housing
• collaborative housing
• co-operatives
• community land trusts
• civil society

Introduction

Self-organised and civil society participation in housing and urban development has received growing interest in many countries from activists and academics alike over the past ten years (Vestbro, 2010; id22, 2012; Fromm, 2012; Minora, Mullins, & Jones, 2013; Tummers, 2016; Savini, 2016). The extent of this interest is probably greater than at any time in the past 40 years. The period 1960 to 1980 had seen a wave of informal forms of participation such as the squatting movement (Vasudevan, 2017) and more formalised activity such as co-operative housing which received significant state support at that time in several countries (Birchall, 1992; Moreau & Pittini, 2012; Lang & Roessl, 2013). However, this wave had largely dissipated between 1980 and 2010, with the space in which self-organised action had thrived being squeezed by the financialisation of housing (Fields & Uffer, 2014), stronger legal sanctions against squatting for example criminalisation in England in 2012 (Bowcott, 2012), the reduction or abolition of state funding mechanisms such as the Co-operative Housing Agency in the UK (Murie, 2008), and the scaling up of community based initiatives such as co-operatives in Austria and housing associations in the Netherlands and England to take on more corporate and less self-organised identities (Lang, 2016; Van Bortel, Mullins, & Gruis, 2010; Mullins, 2010).

The recent resurgence therefore provides an interesting and still little researched phenomenon. Its coincidence with the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) presents an intriguing set of hypotheses relating a surge of civic action to market failure and state failure (leaving spaces for potential civil society action in abandoned cities such as Detroit and housing markets in the north of England where self-help housing was revived – see Mullins, 2018). However, little convincing research exists exploring the wider connections with GFC, and counterfactually we have also seen a resurgence in hot housing markets in Australia where the GFC had little impact on property values (Crabtree, 2018). Other hypotheses relate the resurgence to new sets of institutions and actors such as community land trusts and co-housing models that have spread through increasing internationalisation of social movements in the internet age. This Special Issue brings together a set of papers that begin to explore the apparent resurgence, its extent and nature, provenance and connections to recent economic, societal and policy change in different national and local contexts, thereby avoiding inappropriate or premature generalisation.

This Special Issue resulted from workshops convened by the Social Housing Organisations, Institutions and Governance working group of European Network for Housing Research (ENHR) in Tarragona in 2013 and Lisbon in 2015. Researchers from that working group were detecting an apparent resurgence in self-organised forms of housing provision occupying spaces left by retreating welfare states and housing market failures in several countries; particularly after the GFC. Such forms of provision seemed to respond to a number of housing policy challenges in different countries, including housing affordability, reduction in social and affordable rental housing provision, regeneration requirements in low-income neighbourhoods, and resistance to gentrification (Thompson, 2015; Bunce, 2015). Several working group members were exploring these developments through new research and policy advocacy initiatives and forming more structural links with actors in these fields, which were eventually to lead to a new ENHR Working Group on Collaborative Housing.

Key Questions

In commissioning this Special Issue the editors were interested to establish whether there had really been resurgence in self-organised housing forms in recent years and whether the GFC had been an important driver of this. This would involve charting the histories, social origins and evolution of these forms in different institutional contexts, housing systems and welfare regimes (Salamon & Anheier, 1998; Lawson, 2010; van der Heijden, Dol, & Oxley, 2011). The editors were interested in the participants and identities of these forms. While labels referring to the community-led, participative nature of these organisations had often been used, there was little clarity on how this terminology had been translated into practice nor how interpreted or implemented by the actors themselves. There was also little clarity on the social background and social status of participants of self-organised housing. Is there typically a ‘civic core’ of well-connected and educated actors (Mohan & Bulloch, 2012) or perhaps wider participation, for example, from social housing tenants, new migrants and homeless people needing new forms of housing provision as in the case of the Brussels CLT? (Aernouts & Ryckewaert, 2017)

We were also particularly interested in relations with Government at different scale levels and the role of policy in stimulating, shaping or stunting these developments. We were also concerned with the role or absence of other forms of partnership, especially with larger social housing providers. Finally we were interested in the implications of growth and institutionalisation of these fields; whether and how field actors were considering methods of ‘scaling up’ local initiatives while balancing their independence and community base with technical and financial support requirements (Moore & Mullins, 2013).

The seven papers published in this Special Issue provide provisional answers to most of these questions and also illustrate the ways in which researchers can contribute to knowledge in this field. We therefore highlight the different approaches to theoretical framing and methodology, the research gaps these contributions address, and their implications for future research priorities.

Evidence Base

The published papers provide perspectives from six individual countries: Austria, Australia, England, Norway, Sweden and the US as well as a European overview paper (featuring examples from France and again from Austria). These contributions used a variety of frameworks and methods to explore and discuss a range of forms of self-organised housing (see Table 1 below). Other outputs from the call published separately in this journal provide perspectives from Belgium (Aernouts & Ryckewaert, 2017), Italy (Bronzini, 2017) and Spain (Cabré & Andrés, 2017), taking the country coverage to ten. Thus, while not comprehensive, the coverage is quite wide and allows us to address some of the questions that stimulated the Special Issue call and contribute to a longer-term research agenda.

Table 1. Evidence base for Special Issue papers.

Country	Forms of self-organised housing discussed	Framework and methods	Other key empirical elements
Austria	Collaborative housing	Housing System and Organisational Fields Multi-level analysis Case studies	Baugruppen wave in Vienna Inter-generational living cohousing case in Salzburg
Australia	Self-organised housing	Community economies Slow Cities Literature and secondary data review	Intentional communities, CLTs, , squats, self-building and sweat equity, representation and advocacy movements.
England	CLTs	Network and partnership theory	Two research projects based on nine case study CLTs in England
England	Self-help housing – community-led projects to bring empty homes into use	Policy Cycle analysis Policy Windows and advocacy Longitudinal sector study before and after key policy	Two regional studies and a legacy impact study Community led housing Umbrella Bodies
Norway and Sweden	Co-operatives	Concepts of path dependence	Historical analysis of co-operative housing in Norway and Sweden
US	CLTs	Historical analysis of two case studies based in American cities	Community organising, reformist and radical market principles
Europe (examples from Austria and France)	Collaborative Co-production projects	Theoretical framework to map collaborative projects as co-production with institutional partners from state, market and civil society	Women's housing project in Vienna, resident co-operative in Lyon Partnerships with institutionalised housing providers

Source: The Editors based in review of the Special Issue papers

Definitions and Scope

In putting together this Special Issue, we deliberately gave broad scope to how self-organised and civil society participation in housing might be defined, recognising the importance of context-specific drivers and definitions for these initiatives, as well as the varied forms and purposes of self-organised housing. There is a plethora of contested terms and definitions with different nuances, which include self-organisation, the building of communities as well as housing, and different weight accorded to principles of co-operation, community organising, partnership, and citizen participation (Vestbro, 2010; Fromm, 2012; Tummers, 2016). The varied definitions also highlight the differences in purpose and function that exist between different models of self-organised housing provision. Several authors in this issue focus on questions of definition and usefully link their work to academic and practice-orientated publications that have been influential in shaping operational definitions (Confederation for Cooperative Housing, 2009; Davis, 2010; id22, 2012; Droste, 2015; Jarvis, 2015; Heywood, 2016).

Crabtree (2018) adopts the umbrella term ‘self-organised’ housing in her exhaustive review of the range of models of its production and consumption in Australia; and relates this to community economies research on ‘non-capitalist economic forms that co-exist with capitalism’ (Gibson-Graham, Cameron, & Healy, 2013; Crabtree, 2018, p. 17). This encompasses a wide range of forms including intentional communities, co-operatives, community land trusts (CLTs), squats, self-building and sweat equity and representation and advocacy movements. However, despite their long history in Australia, these fields remain quite distinct and each has ‘struggled to gain substantial traction or scale up’ (p. 35).

Mullins (2018) refers to the wide use of the term ‘community-led housing’ in England, defined in a policy-oriented study as ‘housing shaped and controlled by a group that represents the residents and/or the wider community’ (Heywood, 2016, p. 8). This wider label has been deployed in attempts at field integration between co-operatives, community land trusts, self-help housing, and community-based self-build groups, and achieved through mechanisms such as the Community-Led Housing Alliance, the Community-Led Housing Conference 2017, the UK Government's £300m Community-Led Housing Fund (2016-20), and by major foundations such as the Nationwide Foundation and Power to Change, who now use the same label. (National CLT Network, 2017). Mullins’ paper also uses the narrower label ‘self-help housing’ to refer to the 100 or so ‘local organisations (in England) procuring housing by means of bringing back into use empty properties to live in, organising whatever repairs are necessary to make them habitable’ (p. 144). This term was established by an umbrella body for self-help housing to bring together a disparate range of community projects with an interest in bringing empty homes into use to provide housing for clients, employment training for local communities and develop an asset base and income stream for their organisations.

The papers by Moore (2018) and by Engelsman, Rowe, & Southern (2018) both focus on the specific model of community land trusts (CLTs) and highlight their association ‘with the resurgence of political interest in the role of civil society and community participation’ (Moore, 2018, p. 85) and their core function of providing affordable housing for low-income residents within defined geographical communities. Both highlight the unique locally-oriented, place-based governance structures used by CLTs to operationalise de-commodified community land holding mechanisms. Both also discuss the reformist approaches and principles of partnership that often underpin more radical ambitions of housing decommodification and community control. Sørvoll and Bengtsson's (2018) overview of co-operatives in Scandinavia goes a step further, highlighting historical understandings of cooperatives as partly democratic people-led movements, partly government-subsidised housing providers, and partly businesses competing for greater market share and preferential treatment from the state compared to private market actors.

While the above definitions are largely country and field specific, the papers provided by Lang and Stoeger (2018) and Czischke (2018) both refer to the growing use of an alternative term in mainland Europe: ‘collaborative housing’. This is increasingly displacing the umbrella use of co-housing (for example by id22 [2012], in their pan-European promotional handbook ‘co-housing cultures’) to describe a similar range of self-organised, community-oriented initiatives to the English term community-led housing.

Lang and Stoeger (2018) argue that the term ‘collaborative housing’ is more appropriate in contexts like Austria where ‘organisations cannot primarily be defined by the traditional principles of the cooperative or co-housing movement nor by their purely community-led nature’ (p. 36). This suggests that community-led may be too strong a term to cover all project types. However there are organisations to which that label would fit well such as the ‘Mietshäuser Syndikat’ movement (‘self-organised living for a solidarity base economy’) involving ‘direct action and prefigurative politics’ (Vey, 2016 p.68) from Germany and now operating in Linz in Austria. The diversity of more and less participatory forms is reflected in Austria by the broad umbrella organisation ‘The Initiative for Collaborative Building and Housing’ which includes baugruppen (group building initiatives), co-housing and self-help initiatives in both urban and rural contexts (Lang & Stoeger, 2018).

Czischke (2018) defines collaborative housing as ‘a wide array of initiatives including co-housing, new types of residents’ cooperatives and other forms of collective self-organised housing…defined by high levels of user participation, mutual help and solidarity and different forms of crowd financing and management amongst others’ (p. 56). Her paper places a particular emphasis on partnerships between innovative housing projects and more institutionalised actors in state, market and civil society. Her analytical framework distils the essence of collaborative housing as the outcome of a range of types of co-production (Bovaird, 2007) between these institutions and residents with different degrees of user participation. In this sense, community-led housing would be at one end of the spectrum between the concepts of ‘community benefit’ and ‘community control’ that are commonly referred to in debates on legal form for CLTs in England (National CLT Network, n.d.). These varied degrees of user production and partnership have implications for our understanding of the democratic virtues, purpose, and functional operation of these organisations, as discussed in the following sections.

Social origins and purposes and the impact of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC)

A common theme of most contributions to the Special Issue is that there has been an international resurgence of community-based housing solutions in recent years. However it is generally recognised that most of the examples considered had more diverse and much earlier social origins. Moreover while several authors consider the GFC to have had an impact on the recent resurgence, this is just one of several explanatory factors identified.

The resurgence is generally explained by these papers in the context of state and market failure, growing problems of affordable housing access, with consequent effects on quality of life and social inclusion. Underpinning this are variable degrees of user participation, collective ownership, and democratic decision-making. These features tend to differentiate self-organised providers from other providers of social and affordable housing.

Czischke's (2018) paper argues that some community housing solutions have been triggered by the GFC and financial austerity, which have given rise to new and innovative solutions. Other authors, such as Lang and Stoeger (2018), and Moore (2018), relate the growth of community-led housing to the devolution of state responsibilities to more local levels and to non-state actors. It is also clear that there are longer-term social origins of self-organisation that have also influenced growth. For example, the bringing together of CLTs, cohousing, self-build and self-help housing under the Mutual Housing Group followed the co-operative led Commission on Mutual Housing in England (Confederation of Co-operative Housing, 2009). In addition, the transfer of ideas between third sector and CLT advocacy organisations in the US and England predates the commonly accepted era of austerity and crisis (Moore, 2018; Engelsman et al., 2018).

Crabtree (2018) provides an antidote to any mechanical linking of causation between the resurgence of self-organised housing and the GFC, since the Australian economy ‘is notable for surviving the GFC’ and ‘prices continued to increase in areas within commuting distance of major cities’ (p. 16). Here the impetus seems to have come much more from affordability issues in hot housing markets, which in turn has made development very difficult because of high site costs. Similarly, Engelsman et al.'s (2018) paper provides a historical overview of community land trusts in the US. This shows that community-based struggles for land rights and land use stem from overriding and persistent concerns of gentrification and house price speculation. Sørvoll and Bengtsson's (2018) paper also clearly distinguishes the growth and institutionalisation of co-operative housing in Sweden and Norway from the GFC. Not only did the co-operative sector in these two countries have much earlier origins, but its evolution has also been much longer term and widespread to become a central feature of the housing system. Furthermore, and uniquely in the context of this Special Issue, these sectors are seen to have moved away from responding to the need for affordable housing provision. Rather, through the lifting of price controls on co-operatives and provision of housing to relatively prosperous households, the character of the sector has been transformed and its accessibility and responsiveness to the housing needs of more recent cohorts has diminished. This highlights a core difference in the longer term function and impact of co-operative housing in those countries compared to the other initiatives and models discussed in this Special Issue.

Community organising, governance and partnership

Many of the papers collected here highlight the centrality of principles of participation, democracy and community governance. Engelsman et al. (2018) provide a rich overview of community activism expressed through community land trusts in American cities, arguing that their role extends beyond the mere provision of housing to provide a focal point for increased and continued community activism (p. 120) that works in the interests of place-based communities. Moore (2018) shows that the notions of community leadership and democracy are essential to the growth of community land trusts, though often supported by, facilitated by, and dependent on external partners.

The theme of collaboration between community housing projects and other actors including Government, social housing providers, investors and wider civil society organisations runs through many of the papers in this collection. For example Mullins (2018) highlights the focus of self-help housing projects on responding to housing, employment and training needs of local communities through housing-led action to generate a wide array of community benefits. Self-help housing groups succeeded where they could generate resources through external partnerships, particularly from local authorities and socially-oriented investors. Their biggest period of expansion occurred when they were supported by a short-lived injection of £50 million in state funding.

Czischke's (2018) paper takes the theme of collaborative partnership further by defining the essence of collaborative housing forms as co-production through ‘multi-stakeholder collaboration’. Her paper maps in detail the patterns of co-production between state, market and civil society actors, utilising case studies that identify primary and secondary stakeholders – often acting on the boundaries between the market and civil society – without whom community-led and self-help projects may have struggled to succeed.

Lang and Stoeger (2018) advance our understanding of the influence of institutional context through combining a welfare regimes approach at the macro-level with an organisational fields analysis at the meso-level. This highlights the interplay of land supply, subsidies and regulation at the systems level in stimulating participative social housing models and Baugruppen models in Austria, thanks to the inclusion of social sustainability criteria in developer competitions. This encouragement provided through state, financial and regulatory support for collaborative models is a critical factor and one often lacking in other contexts.

Lang and Stoeger (2018) also emphasise the importance of cultural and context-specific factors at the field level. In their analysis they draw on the strategic action fields literature (Fligstein & Macadam, 2012) to highlight the role of ‘socially skilled actors’ such as architects and project managers in forging alliances with a range of stakeholders to take forward innovative collaborative housing projects. This is an insightful observation and could provide a conceptual addition to other papers (i.e. Czischke, 2018; Moore, 2018; Mullins, 2018; Sørvoll & Bengtsson, 2018) who also highlight the need for skilled, professional input to support organisational growth and sustainability. The case studies offered by Engelsman et al. (2018) are based on community activism and solidarity amongst low-income community members, highlighting the different elements and types of user participation within self-organised, community-led housing models.

It is clear that state promotion, financial support, and elements of preferential treatment are critical to the growth, development and sustainability of these forms of housing provision. Access to finance and land are the most critical barriers faced by self-organised housing, particularly those in the initial stages of formation, and barriers can be reinforced where there is no legal or regulatory recognition for these types of organisation. Sector promotion strategies therefore often focus on securing state support, sometimes with notable success as Mullins (2018) reports in case of recent funding programmes in England for self-help housing (2012-15) and the Community Housing Fund (2016-21).

However, public funding and regulation may generate less desirable impacts. Moore's (2018) article highlights the influence of funding and regulatory frameworks in the English CLT sector, where alignment with regulatory expectations may create partnerships that diverge from core principles of local control, leadership and community-based economies. This acts as a counterpoint to Mullins (2018), whose example of self-help housing groups who qualified for funding by virtue of being outside the state's formal regulation of registered housing providers was important in widening access to public funds and their perceived success.

Sørvoll and Bengtsson (2018) offer the strongest critique of the growth of co-operative housing, arguing that there has been a ‘pyrrhic victory’ (p. 134) due to the erosion of civil society-oriented goals – co-operation, solidarity, price controls – due to a trade-off between these principles and economic success, reinforced by logics of competition and expansion. There are elements of this analysis of larger co-operatives in Lang and Stoeger's (2018) paper in that central and regional state support has strengthened large-scale co-operatives as dominant providers: ‘thus also sustaining institutional isomorphism and paternalism in the non-profit sector’ (p. 49). This runs contrary to the focus on small-scale, locally-embedded forms of provision highlighted by scholars outwith this issue as a defining feature of the sector (Jarvis, 2015).

Conclusion and Future Research Agendas

The collection of papers presented here provide a rich picture of the drivers, purpose and characteristics of self-organised and civil society participation in housing initiatives internationally, providing a degree of definitional and conceptual clarity to the diverse and varied forms and purposes of organisations within this field. It is clear that self-organised housing is subject to a range of context-specific definitions and that internationally the term ‘collaborative housing’ is gaining ground, partly because it shifts focus from the idea of self-organisation to that of partnership and allows for many variant forms depending on context and purpose. We have also seen that the GFC does not offer the only explanation for the resurgence of self-organised housing and that social origins are often much longer term and more diverse.

The authors have developed and deployed some useful conceptual and analytical tools that we believe have a wider application for future comparative studies. Lang and Stoeger's (2018) amalgam of welfare regimes and field theory could be applied to comparative studies or contexts outwith their Austrian case studies. By focusing on several levels of analysis it provides the potential for richer and more contextually nuanced studies than those which typically focus on comparison at the case study level. Czischke's (2018) conceptual mapping of co-production relationships between project actors, the state, market and civil society stakeholders has real explanatory value as well as descriptive application as a fieldwork tool. This is particularly important for the internal organisation, structure and governance of community-led housing projects which remains an under-researched field. Mullins’ attention to the full cycle of policy analysis and the specific role of policy windows in brokering new policies to foster sector growth and to policy legacy to consider the periods after typically short-lived promotional policies also has a wider application (Kingdon, 1984). Sørvoll and Bengtsson's (2018) analysis of the long term trajectory of large scale co-operative sectors takes things even further and is a useful antidote to the less critical and supportive analyses undertaken by researchers exploring newer and smaller scale forms of self-organisation. The case for longer term studies following organisational life-cycles as well as full policy cycles is clear.

The papers presented here are valuable in explaining context, history, and development, but there remains a need for more research as to the real and practical extent to which resident, user and community participation manifests and changes as specific projects progress. We therefore recommend further comparative research focused on the practice of self-organised housing not just at the micro-level of organisations, but also linking the meso-level of stakeholder co-production and policy and to the macro-level of welfare regimes. It is at the macro-level that real debates are to be had about the relationships between the state, market and civil society. How are self-organised forms positioned in relation to competing ideologies associated with the neo-liberal project, withdrawal by the state or failure of the market, and pro- and anti-development interests competing within civil society as ‘localist’ policies are shaped? Crabtree's (2018) article highlights this issue and explores the extent to which self-organised housing can be seen as ‘part of ‘non-capitalist economic forms and activities existing amidst capitalism’ (p. 17). Comparative study could also focus on what the experiences of self-organised and collaborative housing initiatives tell us about changes to welfare systems and housing policies in different international contexts.

A significant remaining research gap relates to the social profile of project participants and the ways in which governance is managed and participation configured. This is particularly important given that state support, devolution and preferential treatment could give rise to the proliferation of further provision based on principles of self-organisation and community, which can be ambiguous and contested concepts. Further consideration of the collective agendas, values, and arrangements for collaboration underpinning these initiatives is warranted and would assist further understanding of the merits, limitations, and potential of self-organised and civil society housing provision. This is especially important, for while there is currently a groundswell of support for these alternative, socially-oriented housing solutions, there is limited comprehensive or comparative study of who the main project beneficiaries are and how these differ between models or change over time.

Finally, and significantly, almost all of the papers in this issue focus on research conducted in the Global North, yet self-provided housing has always been a dominant form of housing provision in the Global South, and new forms of collaborative organisation are continuing to emerge as a way of claiming land use rights and housing for the urban poor (see, for example, the analysis of community land trusts in Kenya provided by Midheme and Moulaert [2013], Crabtree's [2014] earlier work on CLTs and aboriginal land rights in Australia and Donoso and Elsinga's [2017] work on self-organisation in low income condominiums in Latin America). The expansion and proliferation of principles of self-organisation and collaboration extend beyond individual nation states and even beyond the Global North/South binaries that often underpin social science research. The collection of papers presented in this Special Issue, alongside the research gaps discussed here, provides the foundations for further comparative research and analysis of these initiatives in many different global contexts.