citizenship | HaSS Research Impact

Dr Helen Jarvis has worked extensively with the UK Cohousing Network and other Civil Society Organisations (CSO) she tells Dr Eve Forrest about her recent ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) project and how the cohousing concept could help solve the current housing crisis.

The principles of cohousing are simple: provide individuals with their own private living space, plus access to common areas and shared facilities. Cohousing schemes typically feature a mix of 15-30 houses and flats, designed as connected neighbourhoods that encourage plenty of interaction: including a common house (where neighbours prepare meals and eat together) designed to foster and support the spirit of sharing and togetherness. Key to distinguishing community-led cohousing from commercial brands of ‘co-living’ (such as The Collective, London) is the participatory design process and non-hierarchical resident management structure.

Current research shows various forms of communal housing to be a growing trend, associated with our ageing society, more people living alone, escalating house prices, and shifting lifestyle choices including eco-political awareness. Sharing the financial and practical responsibilities of housing, rather than struggling alone, can make life easier through all stages of life. Residents who are attracted to cohousing know that they can make a difference by sharing housing and community resources with their neighbours. To make this work they have to acquire new skills of collective governance. Combining sustainable buildings with fewer private and more shared goods helps to reduce wasteful consumption too, something we should all start thinking about given the recent statements on the current Climate Emergency.

In the UK, cohousing belongs to a niche sector of community-led housing (CLH) which has begun to effectively organise and lobby the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) as an umbrella entity: Community Led Homes. CLH brings together Community Land Trusts (CLT) (a legal entity designed to provide and protect locally valued assets), Housing Cooperatives and self-help housing (volunteers rehabilitating empty property), as well as the internationally recognised Cohousing design methodology.

My original research established public dialogue and practitioner engagement on a national scale of policy and planning in England, Wales and Scotland, concluding with a final report presented in Parliament at a launch hosted by Richard Bacon MP. Sector-wide political lobbying was instrumental in securing a record £300 million investment in CLH in 2016 through Government commitment to use the proceeds of extra stamp duty on second home sales to establish a Community Housing Fund. Administered in two waves by Homes England, the Community Housing Fund is intended to help communities build around 6,000 affordable, eco-friendly homes, with grants of up to £75k available to community groups for pre-development revenue costs, plus capital costs for Local Authorities and Registered Providers to help make sites viable for truly affordable non-traditional housing. Sector-wide lobbying also prompted MHCLG sponsorship of further research and evidence to better understand the impact of cohousing on loneliness.

With support from an ESRC IAA I held a ‘focussing event’ for CSOs, civic leaders and housing practitioners to collectively explore local cohousing opportunities. Participants identified common dilemmas of loneliness and isolation, concern to address issues of ageing in place, fuel poverty, environments ill-suited to walking, cycling and inclusive public life, noting that joined-up solutions require us to build communities, not just units of housing. Community-led housing empowers resident groups to create their own ‘people powered’ local housing solutions.

Impression for how a potential cohousing space might look like

Extensive grassroots engagement via the project helped identify key messages for a short video animation: North East Cohousing Shared Futures, produced in partnership with UK Cohousing Network and Community Led Homes. This resource was made freely available to all interested parties as a tool to ‘demystify’ community-led cohousing for a general audience. The film highlighted the proud tradition of voluntary, community and civil society organising in the North-East as a first step to bridging the gap in knowledge to action. This region faces unique local challenges with rising levels of in-work poverty, loneliness in later life, people and places feeling disconnected. But we can all share stories of a radical past when local communities organised for change – with our once thriving cooperative movement and the knowledge and skills are there to do so again. The North-East, despite hardships, has always had a great tradition of coming together.

All these activities started an ongoing, productive conversation that still continues after the project finished to bring community initiatives and activist groups together and connecting local community groups and spaces. For example, a North-East CLH ‘hub’ has secured Government funding to help provide training and advice to local groups. Moreover, the first elected North of Tyne mayor, Jamie Driscoll, promised ‘genuinely affordable, eco-friendly community-led housing’ as a key pledge in his ambitious manifesto, following consultation with the broad-based CSO Tyne and Wear Citizens.

While the North-East is famous for its radical past and strong support for workers and housing cooperatives in the 1970s, there are currently no inhabited cohousing projects to demonstrate success for the many groups hoping to make CLH a reality on Tyneside. This is likely to change in the near future. Newcastle City Council has recently secured Community Housing Funds to help community groups secure planning permission on brownfield sites in the west end of the city.

Helen’s paper on Community Housing, sharing and togetherness is available here

Professor Janice McLaughlin

Professor Janice McLaughlin is a sociologist in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology and until recently Director of the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre. Her work explores how childhood disability or illness is framed from within the worlds of medicine, community and family. She has looked at themes such as the diagnosis of genetic syndromes in children, the role of medical intervention in the lives and identities of young people with cerebral palsy and the ways in which family lives can be changed, including positively, by the presence of a disabled child. More recently this work has increasingly become focused on questions about citizenship and young people – a shift that has come from working with young people and hearing their concerns about their position in society and their futures.

Working with young people from different backgrounds can be frustrating, challenging and a lot of work. Below I suggest why all of those difficulties are worth it if we are to create spaces where young people have a voice and how we can at least try to do it in ways that work for them. Most of the problems come from the institutional dynamics around children and young people and in themselves present insight into the ways in which society and the state carefully monitor children and their presence in the public realm. While many of these structures have emerged out of previous harms done to children, in themselves they risk producing the social fact that young people are vulnerable rather than being also seen as having the potential and capacity for agency and creativity. Young people can also be very busy, particularly with the demands of schooling (again highlighting the pressures on them from an early age). We have learned the need to be very adaptive to both their timetable and their interests. When a young person’s free time is limited (particularly for disabled young people who are often having to also fit in hospital appointments, surgery, physiotherapy, dealing with welfare agencies, alongside their school life) you need to ensure that if you ask them to give their time that it a) has a point and b) will be interesting to them.

Within a project examining embodiment and disability we explored the use of creative techniques – in particular making things, taking photographs and producing journals – as a way to make things more interesting and relevant to the young people.

Photograph taken by a research participant’s dad to show how he gets downstairs

Piece of jewellery made by a research participant to symbolise the importance of relationships to her

For the young people who participated in that aspect of the project their feedback was that it was very enjoyable and did allow them to express issues around their lives and disability that was meaningful. Mark (none of the names given are people’s real names) represented his pride in his physical strength and ability to find ways to move through space through the picture he had taken of him moving down the stairs. Kim, used the bracelet to symbolise how the relationships around her of friends and family were of vital importance to her and a source of strength to her. So the creative techniques did add something to the project and worked well for those who participated, but here also is the snag, the number of participants who wanted to do these activities in comparison to the usual one to one interview was much less. So while methods papers may suggest that when working with children and young people that we should think about ways to make it more interesting and diverse than a research interview, it is worth checking if that is what young people actually want!

One benefit of the visual material the young people made is it did produce material that was very rich and also very appropriate for taking the findings out to non-academic communities. We worked with a graphic artist, web designer and a group of disabled young people to design a website and booklet that young people could use to explore themes about difference and how society treats children who have something different about them, in this case their bodies. The words and images the young people produced were central to that and the site could not have been developed without their input. The website is now being used by schools, third sector organisations and in teacher training (in New Zealand!).

Screenshot of the website

So to sum up, yes it is worth working with children and young people, it’s obvious really, they have lots to say. But we need to keep thinking through and checking (with them as much as anyone) what the point of doing so is.

Other information:

Open access publications from the project:

McLaughlin, J. and Coleman-Fountain, E. (2014) The unfinished body: The medical and social reshaping of disabled young bodies. Social Science and Medicine. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.09.012

Coleman-Fountain, E. and McLaughlin, J. (2013) The Interactions of Disability and Impairment, Social Theory and Health, 11(2): 133–150, doi:10.1057/sth.2012.21

The research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and ongoing work we are doing with young people on citizenship is supported by the Newcastle Institute for Social Renewal.

Other work and resources we have produced on disabled young people’s views on and participation in sport is also available.

HaSS Research Impact

Research Impact from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS), Newcastle University

Tag Archives: citizenship

Bridging the gap in knowledge to action: focussing on local impact to enable community-led cohousing in the North East