On June 21st 2016, we hosted our final ESRC Seminar on Collaborative Housing and Community Resilience.

Click here to view a full report of our day’s events. We will be livestreaming the event here:

Collaborative Housing and Community Resilience
Seminar 6: Mainstreaming cohousing in urban development–barriers to knowledge transfer

Tuesday, 21st June 2016
10.30 am to 5.00 pm
LSE PhD Academy, Lionel Robbins Building (4th floor)
10 Portugal Street, London WC2A 2HD
London School of Economics and Political Science

10:30 – 11:00 Arrivals, registration and refreshments

European Perspectives

11:00 – 11:15 Introduction to the seminar – Helen Jarvis, Kath Scanlon and Melissa Fernández

11:15 – 12:00 Anna Dijkhius, The Dutch Federation of Intergenerational Intentional Communities
‘Pioneering socio-material design in Dutch cohousing: lessons from Delft’

12:00 – 12:15 Refreshment break

12:15 – 13:00 Michael La Fond, id22: Institute for Creative Sustainability
‘Developing and maintaining Urban CoHousing: practice and policy lessons from Berlin’

13:00 – 14:00 Buffet lunch

Capturing Knowledge, Influencing Policy

14:00 – 14:45 Finance: Ways to stop reinventing the wheel
Matthew Boggan, Triodos Bank

14:45 – 16:00 Panel: Opportunities and challenges for developing urban cohousing
Jo Williams, The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL
Patrick Devlin, Pollard, Thomas Edwards Architects (PTEa)
John Killock, Independent researcher and architect
Maria Brenton, OWCH project consultant; UKCN board member

16:00 – 16:15 Tea

16:15 – 17:00 Workshop discussion
Key messages for Parliament, closing reflections and moving forward
This is the sixth and final event of an ESRC seminar series organised jointly by the UK Cohousing Network with Newcastle, Lancaster, Leeds, London School of Economics, Nottingham and Sheffield Universities.

What the Collaborative Housing and Community Resilience seminar series is about

A group of six UK universities, plus the UK Co-Housing Network, was awarded funding by the ESRC (the main UK Research Council funding social science research) for this series of seminars. The six events will strengthen links between UK and international cohousing networks and make possible new constellations of collaboration and enquiry at the intersections of housing access and affordability, sharing economies, green technology, ecological citizenship and community resilience. The seminars combine scholarly research and debate with practical interventions, including opportunities to visit examples of community-based housing schemes built in the UK. Each seminar is organised around a specific theme. Keynote papers will be presented by international and national experts together with interventions, posters and open-forum discussion. Among our aims are to develop a frame of reference for terminology and concepts to be used in the output from this series.

What this seminar is about 
(‘Mainstreaming cohousing in urban development: barriers to knowledge transfer’)

This final event in the seminar series aims to reflect on the factors that enable or limit the mainstreaming of cohousing in urban development settings. In particular, it seeks to critically address questions regarding knowledge transfer between projects and the ‘professionalisation’ of the collaborative process between communities and expert partners. We will discuss the following questions:

• Under what conditions does knowledge transfer take place and flourish?

• Can collaboration between groups and professionals take place without undermining grassroots autonomy and creativity? What mechanisms can be established to ensure this balance?

• How can the community-led and collaborative housing sectors influence policy?

We will begin by hearing about two European countries where co-housing has been notably successful: the Netherlands, from the perspective of a co-housing professional; and Germany from the perspective of a co-housing resident and activist. After lunch, a panel of UK-based co-housing practitioners, designers and researchers will reflect on their experiences in the field and the constraints and opportunities they identify for development at the intersection of co-design, urban planning and community-building. They will be asked to suggest ‘game-changers’ that could lead to a shift in the policy paradigm for cohousing.

The final session of the day will be an open consultation with participants, chaired by Anna Kear from the UKCN, to gather feedback on our project report, to ask where research agendas and practice could be enhanced, and to identify the key policy requirements for moving the sector forward. This discussion will inform the team’s presentation at the Parliamentary Launch of our report, which will take place the following morning. All written and video outputs from the session will be available afterwards on this website.