Cohousing and Coliving: What They Are, Differences and City Examples

Cohousing is a housing model in which a group of people jointly design and manage a building or cluster with complete private homes and generous common spaces, collective kitchen and dining room, laundry, playrooms, garden, workshops, to share care and resources without giving up privacy. Coliving is its commercial version: an operator rents rooms or small apartments with services and shared areas to tenants who do not know one another, usually young professionals passing through. Both answer the same crisis, expensive housing and lonely lives, but from opposite logics: cooperation in one case, business in the other.

From Denmark to California: McCamant, Durrett and the origin of cohousing

Cohousing was born in Denmark in the late 1960s, when groups of families tired of suburban isolation built the first bofællesskaber, living communities, such as Sættedammen in 1972. The American architects Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett visited those communities and introduced them in Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves (1988), which coined the English term and fixed its features: participation of future residents in design, a neighbourhood laid out for encounter, generous common facilities, management by the residents themselves and no hierarchy. Muir Commons in Davis, California, was in 1991 the first built in the United States.

Care, senior cohousing and right-of-use cooperatives in Spain

The documented benefits are concrete. Residents share meals several times a week, look after children and older people in rotation, lend tools and cars, and reduce their consumption of land, energy and objects thanks to the common spaces. Studies of senior cohousing, the fastest-growing form in Europe, show less loneliness, more autonomy and less use of care homes. In Spain, Trabensol in Madrid and other seniors' cooperatives have shown that the model works for ageing in company, and La Borda in Barcelona or Entrepatios in Madrid have combined it with the right-of-use formula, which keeps housing permanently out of the market.

Limits of the model and how to scale it: Zurich

The model has limits. It requires years of organisation, initial financing capacity and a culture of meetings and consensus that not everyone wants; its residents have historically been middle class and highly educated. Without public land or municipal support, such as Barcelona gives to right-of-use cooperatives or Zurich to its own, cohousing tends to remain out of reach of low incomes. And the scale is small: dozens of homes per project against the size of the crisis. Even so, experiences such as Kalkbreite and Mehr als Wohnen in Zurich, with hundreds of homes and mixed uses, show that it can grow.

Coliving: community or real estate product

Coliving raises different questions. Operators such as The Collective in London offered from 2016 rooms of a few square metres with gym, shared kitchens and event programming, at prices per square metre above conventional rents. Its advocates speak of community and flexibility; its critics, of student halls for adults that normalise living in ten square metres and, by paying more for land, push up rents in the neighbourhood. The distinction is clear: cohousing is collective ownership or use managed by those who live there; coliving is a real estate product managed for profit.

For housing policy, the lesson is twofold. New forms of shared living answer real needs for care, company and affordability that the single-family house and the conventional apartment block do not meet. But they only produce a fairer city when the administration provides land, finance and rules that open them to diverse incomes and keep them out of speculation. McCamant and Durrett summed it up in the title of their book: it is about housing ourselves, and that requires housing to become once again the business of those who live in it.