Vidi grant for Darinka Czischke with project ‘inCommon’
How do we want to live in the 21st century? Society is changing rapidly, but housing is still organised according to traditional family models. Alternative forms of living based on sharing and collectivity challenge this paradigm. Darinka Czischke has received a VIDI grant for her project 'InCommon: Reconceptualising individual and collective housing preferences' in which she explores what motivates different types of people to live collectively.
Solution to many social problems
These ‘collaborative housing forms’ seek to make living more affordable, reduce environmental impact and combat loneliness through stronger social connections. To what extent are more people willing to live like this? InCommon investigates what motivates different types of people to live with higher degrees of sharing and collectivity. This knowledge will offer a new conceptualisation of ‘home’ and a new way to define and measure housing preferences.
Darinka has a long track record of collaborative living research. With the project and open access book ‘Together: Towards Collaborative Living’, she already investigated that -in the midst of an unprecedented housing crisis- more and more people are turning to collective self-organisation to provide community-oriented, sustainable and affordable housing. But why are these initiatives struggling to get off the ground? And what can we learn from other European countries?
Chicken-and-egg story
In an interview in the NRC (25 April 2024), Darinka Czischke argued that this is largely a chicken-and-egg story: without supply, no demand either. The long waiting lists for ‘Knarrenhoven’, a communal housing model for seniors has gained prominence in recent years. Tens of thousands of people are on a waiting list and the supply is only a few hundred houses. ‘The desire for community living is growing,’ says Czischke in NRC. ‘In addition, due to climate change, many people are looking for more sustainable forms of living where they really want to go the extra mile.’ Hard figures are lacking because housing preferences are changeable, depending on supply, and thus difficult to measure.
InCommon
Despite increasing interest by pioneers or ‘early adopters’, we do not know the extent to which more people would be prepared to choose collaborative living if given the choice. The scientific understanding about changing housing preferences in relation to sharing and collectivity is lacking. With InCommon, Darinka aims to fill this knowledge gap by researching the potential for collaborative living forms to be embraced by a wider variety of people. She will do this by identifying and understanding common values and attributes related to collectivity and sharing in housing amongst different types of households.
InCommon will apply a novel methodological approach, which combines the study of housing preferences of early adopters of collaborative living (effective demand) and people who have not (yet) chosen to live like this (latent demand). Findings will propose a new way to define and measure housing preferences by policy and industry, leading to a change in the way we design and build our homes and living environments.
Are we still in time to include this in the huge demand for (newly built) houses?
InCommon will last five years. Throughout the project and up until its end in 2029, this research will provide new knowledge on the preferred housing attributes by different types of households, including a series of design prototypes that incorporate different degrees of sharing and collectivity. In addition, the project will offer a new integrated methodology for policymakers and practitioners to apply to understand residents’ preferences at different scales. A better understanding of the latent demand for collaborative housing forms can help predict the impact of housing investments and the role of sharing and collectivity in urban regeneration and new urban developments. Furthermore, by expanding the understanding of housing preferences to fit consumer preferences that are aligned with new values, housing supply will better match demand, offering more choice to consumers and providing future-adapted housing solutions.
More information
- Darinka Czischke is associate professor in the MBE department of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment.
- NWO has awarded 102 scientists from the science domains of Exact and Natural Sciences (ENW), Technical and Applied Sciences (TTW), Social and Humanities (SGW) and Care Research and Medical Sciences (ZonMw) Vidi funding totalling 86.7 million euros. With this Vidi grant of up to 850,000 euros, researchers will have the opportunity to set up a new research group and develop an innovative line of research over the next five years, among other things. Read the NWO press release.
- A total of eight Vidi grants have been awarded at TU Delft.