Establishing a glossary of community-led housing

Abstract

Recent decades have seen the re-discovery or emergence of a diverse range of housing models such as cohousing, co-operatives, community land trusts, and other forms that seek to address various persistent issues of social, environmental, and economic justice. This has generated commensurate growth in research on the objectives and outcomes of such models, including the creation of relevant typologies of conceptual approaches and schemas of organisational objectives to build understanding of the field’s theoretical and practical implications. Despite the growth of relevant models, their relative unfamiliarity and diversity of forms and objectives means practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and others associated with the field may not understand the forms and objectives of models under examination and development, leading to delays, project failures, and confusion. This paper therefore presents a glossary of community-led housing as a base on which to continue to foster understanding and growth of relevant models, and enable collaborative and comparative work.