ABSTRACT
In France, the idea of pooling resources to obtain decent accommodation emerged in the cooperative initiatives of the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, and then in the anarchist and self-management worker movements of the 1960s to 1970s. They re-emerged at the beginning of the 2000s within a context of economic crisis and growing environmental awareness. The number of projects continues to rise, taking very different forms in terms of legal status, the social makeup of the groups involved, the type of architecture, urban-planning models, etc. In order to compare the French situation with situations in other European countries, it is important to clarify what differentiates copropriété (joint ownership) or colocation (co-tenancy) from what is now called habitat participatif (co-housing), and hence to identify their specific characteristics.
