ABSTRACT
The origin of this issue lies in the Loire Valley, where thanks to Le Studium1 and the Université François Rabelais the first European conference on co-housing research took place in the Town Hall of Tours (France) in March 2012.2 The conference revealed a wide scope of ongoing research in almost all EU-member states, and the lively meeting was the also the start of a number of cross-border research activities. A selection of conference contributions have been developed and brought together in the present thematic issue of JURP. The explicit aim of both the conference and this issue was to move beyond case studies, and to look more particularly at the implications and wider perspective of the current co-housing trend.
