ABSTRACT
Eco-collaborative housing refers to collaborative housing communities that follow environmentally sustainable household and community-level practices; innovate with ownership, financial and governance arrangements; and build and retrofit their housing with low-carbon and environmentally sustainable facilities. We explore how these characteristics of eco-collaborative housing create a hybrid prefigurative model for dwelling beyond the growth paradigm of the contemporary commodified, speculative, precarious housing model. We analyse two distinct types of eco-collaborative housing. Lilac (low impact living affordable community) is an eco-cohousing settlement based around a mutual ownership model with 20 households in West Leeds in the United Kingdom. Kraftwerk1 and Kalkbreite are examples of Zürich’s twenty-first-century radical ‘young housing cooperatives’ based on a rental model in Switzerland. Both are analysed from the perspective of three characteristics of such housing, which involve enabling and disabling roles of state agencies and regulations; internal strategies of mutualism and solidarity; and visions and practices of cogoverning associated land as commons.
