The (human) right to the city includes the right to live somewhere in security, peace and dignity. Globally, the prevailing market-oriented policies focusing on housing as a commodity have failed to enable adequate housing for all. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed this failure – also in Europe. CO-HOPE is a response to this health, housing and social crisis. Through theoretically informed applied research on collaborative housing, this project aims at generating potential-oriented recommendations for policymakers, and implementing an international capacity building programme on collaborative housing that tackles the affordability- integration-health nexus. The results are expected to contribute to a shift in housing politics and provision towards community-led projects that foster sustainable and just transformative urban developments.

Project results summary (tentative)

Aim and purpose related to the project and to the call

CO-HOPE is a response to the health, housing and social crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim is understanding to what extent (and if so, why) people living in Collaborative Housing (CH) communities have been resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic, co-creating a participatory process for future CH development, generating recommendations for policymakers, and build capacity. CO-HOPE has a particular interest on understanding living and ageing together in CH communities in Sweden, France, Austria, Spain and Finland (hereafter consortium countries).

Methods used and experiences that you would like to highlight

The CO-HOPE project comprises interdisciplinary research (WP3) and an Urban Living Lab (WP4, WP5) enabling transdisciplinary co-creation across consortium countries. The interdisciplinary research component has a critical realist-informed convergent mixed-methods design; and consisted of an online survey responded by 393 residents from 49 collaborative housing communities located in Sweden, France, Austria, Spain and Finland. Case study research was carried out in 14 collaborative housing communities through interviews, focus groups and observations. Critical realism ontology and analytical framework enabled shifting data analysis from descriptions of what or how residents cope with the COVID-19 pandemic; to ask why they were able to cope, leading to develop rich causal explanations. The same regarding living and ageing together in collaborative housing settings.

Experiences of working in the interdisciplinary project

The CO-HOPE project featured an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together specialists from a wide range of social science fields, with different “national traditions” in terms of scientific disciplines: architecture, urban planning, social work, sociology, health sciences, and geography. This required the organisation of numerous online seminars to align concepts and frameworks. The project successfully embraced interdisciplinarity by fostering continuous discussion and exchange for carrying out the mixed-methods research. CO-HOPE also engaged non-academic experts, collaborative housing residents and activists, embodying open and participatory science for co-producing a participatory guidebook for future housing development and policy recommendations.

Overall tentative results that you would like to share to the public

Interdisciplinary Research Component – Work Package 3
· Collaborative housing is trending in all participating countries.
· Collaborative housing faces similar general challenges across consortium countries such as the availability of affordable building land and affordable buildings for conversion, lack of knowledge of collaborative housing among public servants, the general public, architects, banks, and developers; and therefore, insufficient support from the public sector.
· Drawing on the existing self-organisation, common spaces and sharing practices, residents of the 14 case studies created new routines, adapted the use of common spaces and exerted their collective agency during the pandemic. Hence, demonstrating that living together in collaborative housing communities as well as caring for each other generates robust forms of preparedness that are likely to be useful again in different types of future crises.
· Collaborative housing communities have diverse features, including initiator type, community size, tenure form, spatial design, and local urban context. CO-HOPE found four conditions that are essential for the successful planning and implementation of new collaborative housing arrangements: demographic structure, self-organisation, physical structure, and sharing practices.
· CO-HOPE found that collaborative housing enables the kind of ageing in place where older adults are stimulated and given purpose by significant social interaction, reducing the risk of feeling lonely or being isolated in everyday life. Therefore, collaborative housing has the potential to play an important role in enabling social possibilities and improved wellbeing for older adults.
· Collaborative housing fosters a supportive environment for families with children by encouraging voluntary support with childcare, which enhances intergenerational social interaction. It offers safe communal spaces where children can make friends and improve their overall well-being.
· Collaborative housing communities contribute to the development of stronger social ties at both community and neighbourhood levels when making their communal spaces available for public use and participating in neighbourhood initiatives like shared gardens and local committees.

Urban Living Lab – Work Packages 4 and 5
The CO-HOPE Urban Living Lab (ULL) consisted of a series of internal online exchanges, study visits to collaborative housing communities and workshops implemented in 2023 and 2024 in Vienna (5, 3 in person, 2 online), Lyon (4, in person), an Expert meeting in Stockholm (1, in person), workshops in Sweden (3, hybrid) and Spain (2, online), as well as an international validation workshop and conference in Vienna (December 2023); and a policy workshop and conference in Lyon (June 2024). All these activities involved members of the research consortium, current and/or future residents of Collaborative Housing projects, civil society organisations promoting Collaborative Housing, practitioners and policymakers. Many of the in-person meetings took place in shared spaces of Collaborative Housing buildings, allowing participants to visit inspiring projects and to discuss with residents.
The learnings from the ULL discussions were translated to two CO-HOPE deliverables: the Guidebook “Co-Creating Collaborative Housing Communities” coordinated and edited by Robert Temel (WP4), and the Policy Brief “Collaborative Housing in Europe. Living laboratories of the future”, coordinated and edited by urbaMonde-France (WP5). These two deliverables will be published and disseminated in 2025.

Capacity Building – Work Package 6
The CO-HOPE capacity building component (WP6) focuses on addressing higher education and popular education levels with the aim of disseminating the main lessons of the project to wider audiences. It is being developed at three levels: an online higher course for academics, social actors and professionals (40 hours) conducted in Spanish, English and French, with 50 participants from different countries; an online seminar for practitioners and a Study Circle with the aim to disseminate the findings to the general public, will be held at Rompemoldes in Spain. Short videos and other multimedia materials are being produced.

Selected CO-HOPE publications

Aksümer, G., and Lussault, M. (forthcoming 2025). Collaborative Housing as a Tool for Reclaiming the Right to the City: Case Studies from France. Paper to be presented at AESOP conference in Istanbul from 7-11 July 2025.
Aksümer, Gizem, Lussault, Michel, (forthcoming 2025) ‘Intergenerational caring in collaborative housing: older adults and mutual care in France’ in Fernández Arrigoitia, M., Felstead, A., Hudson, J., Izuhara, M. Scanlon, K. and West, K. (eds.) Collaborative Housing, Ageing and Social Care: Lessons from Europe, Bristol University Press.
Arnold, P., Brandt, M., Cauletin, M., Bourgeaiseau, P., Lussault, M. (2025). L’Habitat Participatif en Europe. Un laboratoire habité du futur. Recommandations de politique publique. Paris: urbaMonde.
Arroyo, I., Aksümer, G., Hastings, C., Liuke, L., Montesino, N., Granbom, M., Höpler, R., and Peer, Ch. (forthcoming 2025). Living and ageing together in Collaborative Housing. Older adults’ social possibilities, health and wellbeing across four European countries. Housing Studies.
Arroyo, I., Granbom, M., Egerö, U., and Kärnekull, K. (forthcoming 2025). Collaborative Housing Communities: Living and ageing together healthier and more resilient. Policy Brief. Lund: Lund University.
Arroyo, I., Montesino, N. and Granbom, M. (forthcoming 2025). ‘Agency and self-organised care experiences in Sweden’s Collaborative Housing for the Second Half of Life’ in in Fernández Arrigoitia, M., Felstead, A., Hudson, J., Izuhara, M. Scanlon, K. and West, K. (eds.) Collaborative Housing, Ageing and Social Care: Lessons from Europe, Bristol University Press.
CO-HOPE (2025). Co-Creating Collaborative Housing Communities. A Guidebook. Vienna: Robert Temel.
CO-HOPE (2025). Collaborative Housing in Europe. Living laboratories of the future. Policy Brief. Paris: urbaMonde. https://urbamonde.org/IMG/pdf/co-hope_policy_briefs_en_web.pdf