ABSTRACT
Together with Denmark, Sweden has been seen as a model for the international development of co-housing in recent decades, but even as far back as the 1930s. The Swedish kollektivhus (collective houses), built from the 1930s until the 1970s and intended to provide middle-class women with opportunities to enter the workforce, often took the form of private initiatives with little public support. A new co-housing generation in the 1980s, with roots in the 1970s’ alternative movement, aimed to create a sense of community in a society that was understood to generate isolation. Flats left empty in the wake of the 1970s economic crisis offered an opportunity to remodel houses owned by municipal housing companies, thus organizing co-housing in the type of property that dominated in Sweden at the time: rented flats. Contemporary co-housing in Sweden is conditioned by the marketization of Swedish housing since the 1990s, leading to a variety of tenure forms. High construction costs tend to make new co-housing accessible only to a relatively well-to-do middle class. There are no more than around 40 officially listed co-housing projects. Co-housing in Sweden is still a marginal phenomenon, with little public support and little interest from the mainstream housing market.
