Collective Housing

Urban notebooks / Stadsschriften / Cahiers Urbains

In Brussels, the need for affordable and middleincome housing is entangled with the necessity to reduce the environmental impact of housing. The current climatological and health crises demand us to improve the resilience of our human habitat in the city. In planning and developing new collective housing projects, private and public developers alike are struggling to find the right answer to these questions.

In this book, we present a research that identifies mismatches between housing preferences and housing offer. These mismatches are affected by the design of collective housing projects and by how they are produced. By confronting the
Brussels’ examples with cases from Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Hamburg we identify alternative design and organisation strategies.

The cases offer examples to design collective and circulation spaces that mitigate privacy issues and allow multiple use, and show how residents and intermediaries in Baugruppen or cooperatives take responsibility in housing development, design, and management. The book concludes with a reflection of how these lessons learned could be implemented in Brussels’ housing and urban planning policy.