Not Alone and Not in a Home! PhD thesis online.

I’m pleased to say that if you really really want, you can read the whole of my thesis online at:

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10082372/. Also available here on Researchgate if that’s your thing.

Essentially, the question I asked was this:

The idea of groups of older people doing cohousing projects together is just getting going in the UK, with the first one (OWCH in north London) only a couple of years old in terms of actually moving in together. But how do the aspirations of such groups, around companionship and mutual support in later life, actually work out in practice, many more years down the line?

To answer this, it was therefore necessary to go elsewhere – in this case I chose Berlin – to examine groups that are much longer established. Here’s the abstract:

This thesis explores the lived experience of the phenomenon of senior cohousing: a form of intentional, mutually supportive, community where groups of older people live in their own separate homes; have a formalised set of rules for living together; and share some common facilities. Central to the concept is that such communities are an alternative to social isolation, but also represents older people retaining control in later life. By using an ethnographic approach, spending several months primarily with one established group in the city of Berlin, I was able to better understand whether the original aims of such groups are achieved, and how they evolve and adapt in reality over many years together. // My findings are framed primarily through a consideration of the ageing process and identity; I argue that while the model is a practical response to the vicissitudes of ageing and later life, it also represents a rejection of stereotypes of ‘old age’ and an embracing of a new phase or ‘third age’ of life. For the group described in this study (‘LAiC’, or ‘Living Alone in Community’), the enacted shared identity has faded in recent years, with members shifting their focus from the group to other, more individual concerns. I question whether this change from a ‘third age’ group identity to roles we might associate with more ‘traditional’ ageing such as grandparenting, is due to the breakdown of the group or changing priorities as they age. // LAiC provides a social structure in living together that, while not being the close-knit community some had originally hoped for, has offered much that is of value to its members, as a mutually supportive ‘framework’ more than a group of friends or family. A question mark remains however over how the group’s ongoing loss of impetus might now play out, in sustaining the group into the future.

 

Seems a long time ago now that I completed it, and longer still since the getting on for a year (2017) that I spent in Berlin researching it. But aiming to generate papers and reports, forthcoming as they say, soon.

 

The wider benefits of cohousing: The case of Bridport

I’ve been doing a research project for the LSE over the last couple of months, working with Bridport Cohousing CLT for a report exploring the potential social benefits of the project. Hazelmead (as the development will be known) will be the largest cohousing scheme in the UK to date – 53 homes – ambitiously aiming for a high level of sustainable design but also to be 100% affordable. While affordability is intrinsic to the CLT concept*, what’s aimed for here is unique for a cohousing project of this scale. You can find the report here, links to Bridport Coho’s housing offer, and also their regular events and news here. After many years of committed work by the group’s members, construction is due to start in the next few months.

*Broadly speaking, CLTs (Community Land Trusts) are a legal/financial model that enables communities to set up a trust that owns and manages a piece of land (often but not always for purposes of providing affordable housing) whereas cohousing is an intentional community of individual homes whose residents also share a communal space and other resources. So although CLTs usually spring from, or evolve, some sense of community, creating a community is the point of cohousing.

 

(Image courtesy of barefoot architects)

As it happens, this all worked out well for me as I’m based in this part of the southwest for a while, which gave me the chance to go a bit deeper than I might otherwise have done. As it also happens, no sooner did I get started than I won a competition for a desk space for a month at the recently refurb’d Literary & Scientific Institute in Bridport, which is… rather smart to say the least. To reach the co-working desk spaces, you have to pass the cafe, which has excellent cake. It’s not been a slimming experience, but you’ve probably got more self control than me.

 

 

I digress – although not entirely, as there’s quite a few connections between the LSi and the network of people who are involved across CLT’s and multiple other community-led projects in the neighbourhood.  Bridport seems a very connected place with this kind of thing, and you quickly get a sense of a lot of a very active community; there are myriad connections not just around housing projects, but linking to other community-related schemes, campaigns and so on, including a strong theme of community gardening – Bridport’s community orchard, for instance. Interestingly, while I like to moan about Bridport’s lack of a rail station, more than one person has suggested to me that it’s one of the factors that has given people a sense of ‘wanting to get on and do things’ as a community – as opposed to dormitory town.

Anyhoo, back at the report itself… the potential social benefits are considered from two perspectives: firstly as benefits to the residents of the new community, but also the often less easily defined benefits to the wider community. Key themes included the provision of affordable housing and how to ensure access by a diversity of local people, the ecological design of the development, alongside the potential for sharing resources as a community, both between members and with the wider neighbourhood, and more. One especially striking aspect is that the project will include accommodation for staff at the community hospital next door, and the relationship might potentially go even further, with an apartment for post-op ‘interim’ care.

Of course not every one of these things flow automatically from being cohousing per se. But as is so often the case with cohousing projects, a core of committed people have driven the scheme forward over many years, and in doing so ensured that the key elements have survived the long gestation process. I would argue (indeed I have done in the report) that the resulting development is something that just couldn’t be delivered as speculative housing – and not least because a profit-driven developer-led scheme would likely have not got planning consent in the first place on such a sensitive site.

In talking to various individuals connected with the project, what’s also striking is the strength of a movement in the region around community-led housing. So far the big success story has been CLTs: there are at least 20 completed housing projects in the immediate area, largely driven by Wessex Community Assets, who in effect formed a community-led housing hub and network several years before that was a thing.

 

Update 6 Oct: Bridport CoHo’s own Monica King was the well-deserved winner yesterday at the UK Community Land Trust’s AGM in the ‘Can’t Stop Won’t Stop’ category for sheer tenacity!

 

RUSS CLT’s community housing meetings, 2019

Update: This was the first of a series of monthly events I was involved with as a RUSS member, whose site also blogged on these: https://www.theruss.org/getinvolved/meeting-location-details/

RUSS is restarting it’s events soon, and has a lot going on, including the completion of their self-build community hub.

I’ve been a member of RUSS for a while, but it’s only the past year that I’ve started to get a bit more involved. Essentially, RUSS is a community-led organisation currently working on its first self-build housing project, in Lewisham, south-east London. Importantly, its committed to providing (properly) affordable housing for local people, and has been set up as a Community Land Trust.

Anyhoo, next Wednesday, (16th January) at 7pm RUSS is starting a new, monthly programme of events, open to non-members, each one focussing on a different theme or question around community-led housing. Full details here, but from the Facebook event:

The first 30 minutes will be dedicated to new and prospective members who want to find out more about what RUSS is doing and how they can get involved. The last hour of the evening will involve a special talk from RUSS founder and former chair, Kareem Dayes, and former board member and Walters Way resident, Alice Grahame, on Walters Way itself, the inspiration behind RUSS.

This is a great opportunity to become part of the growing RUSS community as we welcome prospective members, new members and speakers to join us every month:

In February, Ted Stevens, a RUSS Trustee, will be speaking about other self-build projects in the UK and Europe, and Megan Ancliffe, and RUSS trustee, will be speaking about the RUSS community hub just before building work gets underway in March.

 

Future Homes for London, 13th/14th April 2018, RCA

https://www.rca.ac.uk/schools/school-of-architecture/school-architecture-events/future-homes-london-alternate-models/

Here’s some notes, in a not terribly organised fashion, from two very productive days at an event last week organised by the RCA’s school of architecture. In fact it was a kind of co-production with StART – the St. Anne’s Redevelopment Trust – a community-driven Trust based in Haringey, that is looking to purchase a site in the borough being sold by the local NHS Trust, and build genuinely affordable housing on it.

The event title was open, but what it was really about was how we might begin to build the homes that the UK really needs, that are affordable by the people who really need them. The focus was on models: Community Land Trusts, Co-operatives, and – to a lesser extent – CoHousing. (I know, CoHousing is my thing, bear with me.)

I won’t try and try and reproduce all the discussions or presentations here – a lot of ground was covered. Also, there should be slides posted from all the speakers at some point, and I’ll add/link to these.

Instead, here’s what I thought was interesting / useful to know / or struck me as important.

A bit about StART

Their own site tells you lots – they’re a Trust, but seem to think that the most likely form they will take will be a CLT, or Community Land Trust. Key to this is that the Trust is controlled by the local community, which allows the land owned by the Trust to remain in its ownership in perpetuity, to be used or disposed of only under the rules of the Trust.

Not to be confused with co-operatives or CoHousing, neither of which are strictly speaking about ownership.

Here’s what Vanessa Rickett from StART described as their four primary aims:

FIRST:  The Trust must have control, in perpetuity. This means ownership of the freehold.

SECOND:  The homes on the site must be genuinely affordable, in perpetuity.

THIRD:  Control over who gets to live there: local people, those with a specific housing need, but a mix.

FOURTH:  Control over the physical form of the homes and the overall development: green space (1), specialised housing for vulnerable, good quality – and high density! (2) homes built to much better than market standards.

(1) Interestingly, the Trust is keen for the green space to be used as a ‘porous border’ both by its own residents and those recovering from mental health issues on the part of the site to be retained by the NHS.

(2) The NHS Trust had planned for 470 homes on the site. StART have found that in fact, there is broad local support for almost double that density, IF they are genuinely affordable.

Post blog news: GLA purchases the site! 

Projects from other countries

A pretty inspiring mix of projects from elsewhere in Europe, and Australia, a quick roundup…

Although there were two CoHousing projects presented from Berlin, I might write about these separately, so will jump over these for the moment. Both followed the Baugruppe model, which in this context is pretty much CoHousing. As such, both schemes were privately owned by their residents, not the co-operative or CLT models that were the focus of much of the subsequent discussion. (Silvia Carpeneto from Carpaneto Schöningh Architekten in Berlin wasn’t able to be there, but I know her and the Co-operative project, Spreefeld, well, and touched on it in a previous post.)

 

Anyhoo, the others:

La Borda – an ambitious new co-operative in Barcelona that’s also a CoHousing project. The group seems to have channelled a fantastic amount of local energy into creating a project – now nearing completion – that has managed to pull off a mix of low-cost but inspired, environmentally efficient design that’s both affordable and physically integrated into the public realm.

Kraftwerk I – an impressive part of Zurich (and Switzerland’s) huge co-operative housing sector. English here. Some factoids about co-operative housing in Switzerland:

• a whopping 20% of Zurich’s housing is co-ops, likely to increase (!) to 35% in the foreseeable future. (!!)
• Co-operatives are the model for social housing provision, with 10-20% subsidised for this purpose, but also serve a much larger slice of the population.
• Although we have many housing co-ops in the UK, some of these are not owners of their own housing or freeholds, In Switzerland, all housing co-ops are more like CLTs – the members each hold a ‘co-operative share’, and also pay rent to the co-op. They are, effectively owners for the time they live there, but can’t buy or sell their share, i.e. they can’t use their home as a speculative asset.
• Yes, Zurich does have a crisis-level shortage of affordable housing, but recent legislation ensures that it can sell housing land ONLY to housing co-operatives.

The Nightingale Model, Melbourne. Melbourne’s housing market seems spectacularly broken even by British standards, especially in environmental terms. Jeremy McLeod of Breathe explained how he had self-financed the start of a chain of housing projects that cut out the large house builders to create some housing that was he described as “just good-normal housing” – apartment blocks that offers less-is-more, stripped down, green design at a lower than market price. This is achieved through many ideas: cutting out the sales and promotion costs of big developers, stripping out unnecessary levels of finish, fighting – successfully – against the nonsensical planning requirement for car parking, and using the spare space created for discount-rented startup business in its place.

Notably (for me and my work, especially) – he emphasised a particular aspect of market failure: younger people are being told ‘renting is fine, you’re a flexible, mobile generation’. But what happens when those now young renters hit retirement age? He noted that at one of his first projects (where he also lives I think?) – the social glue is essentially three women over 60 (also, a guy who doesn’t talk much but walks his dog for him).

Key thoughts

My own thoughts, not necessarily reflecting exactly what was presented on the day:

1. What CLTs, Housing Co-ops, CoHousing have in common: all are trying to offer people what the housing market is totally failing to do.
2. But also, sadly, what the state is failing to do. In fact, local authorities, health trusts and others in possession of land are often not trusted to do the right thing with that land, because those authorities so strapped for cash; selling off the family silver to plug a hole in their operating costs.
3. Community Land Trusts have the specific aim of creating housing that is removed from speculation; something that is a home, not an asset class.
4. Touched on, but not explored in great depth: who actually is ‘the community’? In rural situations this might actually be clearer; in urban areas it makes sense that the community is local people. And that the housing should be provision for a range of people in greatest need. But more than one person from StART admitted they were struggling to reach those who are probably in greatest need.
5. Drawing on both 2. and 3. – under what legitimacy are decisions made by a Community Trust, particularly in terms of housing allocation?
6. Not a talking point on the day… but a young friend of mine who was there pointed out (to me) that many young Londoners who rent are forced to move often; they are never able to become ‘local people’.

And the biggest issue: financing and access to land. The seemingly impossible challenge is, of course, how a community groups gets money to buy land, especially in the southeast and London, in order to produce housing that can be removed from market speculation in the first place.

StART are fundraising, and need £50million. Do get in touch with them if you’re up for a donation.

What was very interesting though was the input toward the end of the Day 2 by Pete Gladwell (Head of Public Sector Partnerships, Legal & General Investment Management). He painted a picture of growing pension funds looking to invest more directly in housing provision than previously, much of which had been done through lending to central and local government, as well as to housing associations. Key is that what such funds are seeking is ‘patient’ investment, nowadays the opposite of what the major house builders are looking for, and that community-driven projects might find this an increasingly fruitful source of financing.

Finally, in my ‘own realm’ of older people and CoHousing, Stephen Hill, speaking about the K1 CoHousing project in Cambridge, touched on the fact that some older buyers with equity had been able to invest in the first phase as a kind of ‘kickstarter’ effect. I might have misunderstood that particular comment (will revisit this at some point). But it did occur to me that something that might provide one small part of the funding solution is this:

Community Land Trusts have a community, but need capital

Many (I know, not all) older people have capital, but lack (local) community

Just sayin’.

 

Self-Build Homes

I’ve contributed a chapter to a new book about self-build homes. It’s called Self-Build Homes. Helpfully, publisher UCL Press has a policy of including a free download version, so no excuse.

Even more excitingly, there’s a launch event, Friday 11th May 2018 at 17.30, do come along if you’re in London. Free drinks and nibbles? Yes.

In fact, ‘self-build homes’ is a term that in this context encompasses a range of approaches and practices that are more than ‘just’ physically building your own home, or those annoying couples you see on Grand Designs*.

Rather, it examines – among other things – the creation of homes through various perspectives of co-production, community, neighbourhood, culture and politics, as well as case studies and commentaries on actual projects.

My chapter’s called Senior co-housing: restoring sociable community in later life, in which I followed two groups of older people (back in 2015) attempting to create new-build co-housing projects, one in north London, the other near Colchester in Essex.

 

 

___________________________________________________________________________

*How about a series special called Grand Designs: Bank of Mum & Dad, where Kevin-bloody-McCloud talks to the people who actually pay for the inevitable but mysteriously-uninvestigated £600k cost overrun incurred by the pair of dumb graphic designers from Highbury who’ve decided to leave the rat race (i.e. North London) and convert an iron age hill fort near Swindon into a vast pseudo-modern-timber-and-recycled-rusty-cladding project that is, at the end of the day (cue panning shot with Kevin’s voiceover) “what good architecture is really all about…”

Nicht allein, und nicht ins Heim!*

*Not alone, and not in a home!

It’s easy to lose yourself in your own academic thinking bubble when you’re doing a PhD. Hence a post to let a little daylight / other people into my world at the moment.

I spent from April till the end of last year doing fieldwork in the Berlin, essentially interviewing, observing and generally hanging out with some different groups of (mainly) older people who have formed intentional communities together, in these cases various models of Co-Housing (see earlier post). The background to this is that I’m interested in how community-based housing models might offer some responses to the challenges of an ageing, increasingly isolated population.

As noted in previous blogs, intentional communities, Co-Housing, building groups (Baugruppen), and other forms of living that have some community or shared element are pretty common in Berlin, and Germany. But what isn’t common is groups who are specifically older getting together to do this. I found three in total. Or I thought I had – it turned out to be a bit more complicated.

Of the three, the first one hadn’t quite played out as the groups founders had planned, in that members often had primary homes and lives elsewhere, making their shared Berlin project more of a pied-à-terre. The second one I’d come across – a group who live in a ‘cluster-apartment’ or WG that’s part of the larger and well-publicised co-operative development at Spreefeld – isn’t strictly a group of older people at all.  The age range is roughly 50-somethings to 70-somethings (plus a couple of younger folk) and they didn’t set out to be an age-based project. These may seem like fine distinctions, but when you’re picking this apart for a PhD, such distinctions become important.

So while the first two groups have certainly ‘informed my research’, I’ve focussed mainly on the third one. They’re called “Allein Wohnen in Gemeinschaft”. Or “AlWiG” for short. Or “Living alone in community”, for long again.

They’re interesting in all kinds of ways, but in the context of what I’m doing, especially  because:

1. They’ve been together as a group for over a decade now, whereas the most established comparable group in the UK (OWCH – Older Women’s CoHousing) moved in together not much more than a year ago.
2. They were explicit about being a group of older people, who would be there for each other as they grew older.
3. Very unusually, for a co-living group of any age, they didn’t construct a bespoke housing project with individual apartments with a central, shared facility at its core (generally the model for Co-Housing), but instead, they rent a ‘cluster’ of apartments on an existing (social) housing estate in a less affluent area of south-east Berlin.

 

I feel like this third thing is especially current at the moment, as co-housing just isn’t going to scale up in any real way if it remains something that involves the huge palaver of in effect becoming a developer: finding a site, BUYING that site, building the housing, and all self-financed while still needing an existing home to live in. Many drop out along the way, and if you’re doing this as an older group, some members might not make it at all. And not least of course, all this makes it very exclusive, limiting the model to those with a lot of (economic) capital.

Adapting existing buildings has got to be at least a part of the answer, a so-called ‘retrofit’ approach that I know the UK Co-Housing Network were talking about a while back.

As noted above, the group also rents, which in Germany is a far more secure tenure than it is in the UK. Although I can’t ignore the fact that some of those I interviewed in other groups did regard full ownership (or a tenure that amounts to it) as important, in terms of security as a retired person.

Anyhoo, some photos.

A couple of images of the Spreefeld co-operative. Architecture!

Aerial view of the three blocks that form the whole Spreefeld development (Image: id22)

 

Typical ‘cluster’ over two floors – shared space highlighted in yellow (Image: fatkoehl architekten)

 

Shared external space (Image: id22)

 

I still have memories of the site before the project was built – Sunday afternoons spent dancing on top of (or inside) the boathouse at Kiki Blofeld, across the river from Bar 25 (which now of course the newly emergent Holzmarkt development, which I’ll write about another time, promise).

Here’s a picture of the Rollberg estate, where AlWiG live. Doesn’t look much from this view, but it’s (also) quite an interesting development in architectural terms, completed in 1982 and something of an exemplar of its day. A separate post on this, maybe.

Back in Berlin, and collaborative housing.

Have been back in Berlin since May (here till end of October), for research purposes. No, really. I’m a recipient of ESRC funding to do a PhD looking at cohousing in Berlin, specifically what can be learned from groups of older people coming together and creating their own housing projects. I did a short study of two such groups in London in 2015, but both were in the development phase – I wanted to look at groups who were actually long-established and living together. And also spend my entire summer in Berlin*.

I first came across cohousing for/by older groups, when one was being built right across the canal from me when I last lived here. I quickly and incorrectly assumed that:

a) all cohousing was created for and by older people, and

b) that the one I’d seen was just one of loads that existed in Berlin

Cohousing turned out to be for people of all generations (although it’s not quite as simple as this, as I will be exploring at some later date). And the one example of a specifically older group turned out to be one of…  only two in Berlin. Thus these are the two Berlin examples that I have selected. To be fair, there do seem to be a large number of cohousing projects done by older groups that are in progress and likely to open within the next year or so, but that’s no use when you want to look at how it’s working out in practice.

Anyhoo, what is cohousing? Good question. It’s an intentional community (intentional neighbourhood is a term often used) where a group has come together to live in individual dwellings, but clustered around a common space. It’s nota commune. The ‘intentional’ bit comes from an agreement by all involved that they will work to actively maintain a community, with regular events, sharing a meal together weekly, and so on. It’s better described here.

My question of ‘what might the UK learn from examples in Berlin?’ is perhaps slightly undermined by the strong tradition of community-driven housing that already exists in Germany (and Berlin in particular). Here there’s a lot of different forms of housing – legal, financial social and architectural that make up a kind of ‘field’ of alternative community housing, and cohousing often overlaps with some of these. As one background element to my own research, I’m exploring some of these – the following is an attempt at describing a couple, just some thoughts rather than a full or accurate description:

• A Baugruppe [‘Building Group’] – essentially where a group gets together and commissions or builds their own housing development, just how they want it. Self-funded private Cohousing often uses this model, and could in principle be done more in the UK, but but in Germany there’s more of an established legal model, specialist lawyers and other specialists etc, who make this a relatively common thing.
• A Genossenschaft (= co-operative, sort of) – these have a long tradition in Germany / Berlin, and form the major part of what we in the UK would view as social housing, similar in some ways to housing associations, and which often receive(d) state funding.
• A ‘new-generation’ Genossenschaft – often overlapping with Baugruppen, a group come together and sets up a housing co-operative, raising their own funds, with the co-op owns the land/buildings, and everyone rents. Each co-op member/renter has a right to their tenancy in perpetuity, and the rent is theoretically lower as no external owner is making a profit. Cohousing could use this model too – it’s arguably closer in practice to Community Land Trusts in the UK.

 

In the case of one of the groups I’m looking at, it’s none of the above – the group rents apartments in an existing housing estate (better than that sounds), along with an additional apartment that they rent jointly as a communal space. It therefore exists essentially as an idea more than a physical form, but socially seems to work very well.

You might be thinking this all sounds a bit Scandinavian (it is) and seems like a good-idea-in-principle-but-not-my-sort-of-thing-really. I can understand that. But the aspect that appeals to me personally is what it might offer as we get older – a group of friends, or at least amenable acquaintances – who are proximate, who you can do stuff with or drop in on without having to travel miles, and who can support each other when family are (increasingly) far away.

The questions I’m asking are rooted in sociology and gerontology (How does it work out in practice? How do we differently negotiate the exigencies of later life through such communities?) which was… something of a struggle for a while, as it’s not my background.

__________________________________________________________

*Ha ha, I said to friends in London, I’m off to spend an endless summer in Berlin, enjoying proper ice cream and al fresco electronic dance music, while you all remain in London moaning about the weather and going to work a lot. Not so. It has been raining in Berlin since late April**, and shows no sign of stopping as I write this in July.

**I’m exaggerating, but not a lot. The weather has been much better in London. But I have eaten some good ice cream, and also some clubbing, things no longer possible in the UK capital since all ice cream outlets, clubs, pubs, decent bars, markets, sports facilities, public swimming pools, parks and libraries have been redeveloped into thirty storeys of luxury apartments***

***By which we all now, of course, mean shit apartments. But with a concierge, gym, Cafe Nero and Sainsbury’s local cluttering the ground level in place of a decent public realm. Or an ice cream shop.