Collective Housing and How It Effects Contemporary Planning – Learning From the Danish Bofælleskaber From a Complexity Perspective

Abstract

In the light of current emergence and promotion of collective private commissioning for housing (co-housing) in the Netherlands, this paper explores the encounters such civic initiatives have with spatial planning practice. Co-housing is a challenge for conventional planning practices since it moves beyond the well-known concept of governmental-led participatory planning, and side-lines conventional public-private partnerships. Instead, planners are confronted with the capriciousness and diversity of civil actor-groups, and civic groups are challenged by a rigorous planning system – both of them working within their own logic. In order to study how co-housing initiatives and practices of spatial planning interrelate and effect each other, three recent planning experiences in the establishment of ‘Bofælleskaber’ in Denmark are explored. The comparison between Denmark and the Netherlands is made because both countries have similar planning systems, while communal housing is a strong cultural element in Danish society. Defining the actor groups initiating co-housing schemes as ‘self-organized’ (the emergence of new structure out of fairly unstructured beginnings) (Cilliers 1989) and the process towards realisation of their projects as ‘translation towards actor-networks’ (Callon 1986, Latour 2005), brings together elements from both actor-network theory and complexity theory into one analytical framework. Using this analytical approach, the trajectories the initiatives took towards realization are studied, with emphasis on how they engage in planning and what controversies and associations arise from these interactions. This framework does not focus on the merging of perspectives into a coherent whole, but rather on the multiple trajectories that run through a process of establishing a co-housing initiative (cf. Massey 2005, Hillier 2007). From these cases, lessons can be learned on how planning systems can be made more adaptive to self-organization by community-based networks.