One of the basic principles of the Inclusive City is that everyone has equal access to the opportunities and facilities offered by the city. To ensure that equal access, the City of Rotterdam strives for mixed urban environments. Mixed collective housing enables residents of different incomes and backgrounds to share collective spaces - allowing them to interact with each other, share experiences and thereby access opportunities. With this assumption in mind, we asked: what forms can collective housing take, and how can urban planners and designers play a role in the development of collective housing?
Through design research, in collaboration with the Municipality of Rotterdam, we mapped out what mixed collective living looks like, what types of collective housing forms can be developed and which projects set a good example. This research was made possible in part by the Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie NL.
**Why collective living?
Realizing mixed urban environments would not only mean that people with different incomes and backgrounds live scattered throughout neighborhoods, equalizing the physical distance to amenities. It would also mean making room for chance encounters (between people of different social groups). Casual encounters can help strengthen mutual trust in a neighborhood - which in turn can lead to new opportunities.
In our field, cooperative living as a long-term affordable housing solution is now a well-known concept. A housing cooperative is an autonomous organization of individuals who voluntarily unite to meet their common housing needs and desires through a non-profit enterprise that they jointly own, operate and democratically govern. Since the cooperative is non-profit, its property cannot be treated as a commodity. Income generated by the cooperative project is not taken as profit, but reinvested in the system itself (Operation Residential Cooperative, Arie Lengkeek and Peter Kuenzli, 2022). Thus, cooperatives build up capital over time that can be invested in new housing projects, as happened in the case of the Zollhaus in Zurich. This project was developed by Genossenschaft Kalbreite with money earned from their housing project of the same name.
**Why does it concern us urban planners?
Experimenting with collective housing is not new to the architectural discipline. But by the time the architect is commissioned to design a housing project, , many choices have already been established that do not favor collective design. As urban designers, we influence the quality of residential projects early on. Although spatial principles that promote collectivity have been extensively studied at the architectural scale, our understanding of how these principles influence urban design (and vice versa) is still limited. Therefore, we focused on the research question: what can urban planners do to encourage collectivity?
Typologies
Urban planners set the preconditions for collectivity by defining certain important aspects, such as the transitions between public-private or the desired GLA - GLA ratio. Certain block typologies are more suitable to accommodate collective housing projects than others. We therefore show block typologies that can facilitate collective housing projects, for example by providing sufficient space for access, collective spaces and (public) outdoor areas.
Spatial principles
Interviews, literature review and the analysis of reference projects led to the development of eight design principles that should be taken into account to promote collectivity in urban developments.
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