Beyond wishful thinking: co-housing practices, gender and climate change

Urban cohousing is emerging in Europe as part of an inclusive sustainable development agenda. Cohousing initiators create sharing practices, e.g. colocation of services, car-sharing and democratic decision-making, that enhance sustainable consumption. These are combined with technical solutions for resource efficiency such as water recycling, clean energy production and waste reduction. Cohousing dates from the 1970s and is often associated with female inhabitant wanting to alleviate the burden of domestic work. Contrary to many sectoral policy programs, in cohousing projects' self-profiling there is both environmental and social awareness.Many believe such projects hold promise for creating livable communities that are low in environmental impact and high in social welfare. Such expectations position cohousing between the retreating welfare state and individual household solutions. Yet they also raise questions: is cohousing able to redress inequalities of wealth and power? Do they enable a fair distribution of unpaid labour and leisure time? Can they ensure equal access to decision making? While complex questions, we argue that these need to be part of any vision of, or plan for, sustainable human settlements. So far there is no systematic monitoring of either the environmental or gender equality impact of cohousing. Impact assessment meets with difficulties because of fundamental differences between the local and national contexts from which the projects emerge. Our paper includes primary data from a sample of cohousing projects in the UK and Netherlands to research these questions on a small scale, looking specifically at sharing practices that address climate change and can be expected to have an impact on gender equality. Taking a critical feminist approach, we aim to bridge the knowledge gap that exists between social justice goals and socio-technical designs for sustainability in housing policy.