Lucia Chaloin
ESR3
Supervising team
Adriana Diaconu (Supervisor) Paulette Duarte (Co-Supervisor) Joris Hoekstra (Co-Supervisor)Secondments
Lisbon City Council, PortugalResearch project
ESR3 - Housing governance beyond city boundaries
Lucia obtained a master degree in Sociology and Social Sciences at the Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna, gaining experience in qualitative methods for social research and urban studies. She developed a thesis on cultural approaches and welfare, valued with highest marks by the commission. Her formation comprises Community Welfare Management and Social Impact Management.
She gained experience in observing and analysing social innovation processes developing social impact framework for community welfare development working with Aiccon, Association for non-profit and cooperation culture. She has gained competences in research action methodology and co-design research, working for Horizon 2020 program ENLIGHTENme in collaboration with London School of Economics and Urban Innovation Foundation together with the Municipality of Bologna. She developed co-design competences as well as pedagogic skills to pursue a research-action on a district of the city of Bologna concerning youth and territory
She gained experience in observing and analysing social innovation processes developing social impact framework for community welfare development working with Aiccon, Association for non-profit and cooperation culture. She has gained competences in research action methodology and co-design research, working for Horizon 2020 program ENLIGHTENme in collaboration with London School of Economics and Urban Innovation Foundation together with the Municipality of Bologna. She developed co-design competences as well as pedagogic skills to pursue a research-action on a district of the city of Bologna concerning youth and territory
September, 18, 2023
Governance systems for social innovation in housing: risks, opportunities and new strategies for public action
The project derives its origins from the hypothesis that new forms of governance are needed to support innovative solutions in the field of housing. Innovative partnerships may better respond to fast-changing needs of the population, in particular with the emergence of new profiles of vulnerability. Even if public housing is at risk to reproduce social hardship in deprived neighbourhoods, it also represents resources of affordable housing. From this perspective, the project puts forward the need to reboot the mechanisms of social housing by finding new directions for public action in this field, since public housing neighbourhoods often coincide with fragility concentration. The aim of this research is to provide an assessment of governance systems’ ability to support innovative affordable solutions to housing needs. Target groups will be certain vulnerable sections of the population that face difficulties in accessing housing according to their needs and financial possibilities: young people and people with migration background. The focus will be placed on recent co-housing projects with innovative formulas for these two social categories, along with differences and relationships between them and between the newcomers and the other residents of the area.
The research will focus on studying arenas of encounter of new local actors that integrate systems of housing governance with more traditional ones. The challenge for renewing the social housing device is to connect institutional actors’ networks with bottom-up initiatives of social housing innovation and create new forms of governance. Therefore, this research aims at observing local networks through a social innovation analytical framework, and seeks to understand relational systems of stakeholders, assetholders and beneficiaries. The relational ecosystems that support local governance systems will be analysed to clarify the types of features (e.g. heterogeneity and plurality in governance) needed to provide impact-oriented housing solutions.
The research develops across two southern European national housing systems that share the same characteristics such as a small public housing stock and very limited public expenses on housing: Portugal and Italy. In the city of Bologna, in Italy, will be studied the case of the first Italian cohousing experience completely managed by the public administration within the field of youth policies. Based on the Lisbon municipality's experience in deprived neighbourhoods (BIP ZIP programmes), Portugal can provide interesting elements for widening the analytical framework and for analysing local public action in a European context similar to the Italian one. A case study will be then individuated in the Lisbon metropolitan area to be compared with the one in Bologna.
Mixed methods will mainly entail spatial analysis with an ethnographic approach. The spatial analysis will address historical reconstruction of public housing distribution across neighbourhoods and its transformations in new projects. This to understand the distribution of innovative housing projects across priority neighbourhoods and not. Furthermore, the ethnographic investigation along with that of chosen housing schemes will provide a deep understanding of risks and opportunities for the new forms of public action. New perspectives will emerge for facilitating the provision of housing that is both affordable for social groups that are excluded from the housing market and that contributes to the sustainable evolution of these neighbourhoods.
Reference documents
A hidden potentiality on the field
Posted on 11-07-2024
At the beginning of 2024, I conducted a secondment at the Department of housing policies at Lisbon City Council. Since I was carrying out research on collaborative housing and innovation, I searched for an experiment in the field of housing to compare with the case I studied in Bologna. The Italian case (co-housing Porto15) had been developed through a public intervention that aimed to build a community of residents that shared spaces and promoted a more sustainable lifestyle in the neighbourhood.
My colleagues from the housing policies department where I was based piqued my interest by telling me about an innovative rehabilitation project that experimented with Tetris to avoid relocating residents into temporary housing. Thus, it aimed to protect the community living there. The construction site was confined to a part of the building while residents continued to live in the remaining part, with the living place and the building site switching in the subsequent phases of the project. This is Vila Romão, an old workers' villa owned by the Municipality of Lisbon, which was undergoing rehabilitation during my secondment due to the precarious conditions of the building.
The municipality of Lisbon and the construction team took on the challenge of integrating residents into the retrofitting project, considering this the most suitable approach to the residents’ needs and life conditions. What was even more interesting was that this challenge concealed another one: the integration of a vulnerable resident population into a retrofitting project.
The municipality faced this challenge by successfully involving individuals with special social skills in the renovation works. The building company carrying on the renovation was unique in agreeing to work under conditions that required extra workload for temporary connections of electricity, gas, and energy, and their maintenance, along with continuous efforts to interact with residents. Additionally, the municipal coordinator of the rehabilitation was explicitly chosen by the municipality for her profile and attitude. She was favourable to working in an environment of close proximity with residents and appreciated human contact.
Upon arriving for my first site visit, it became clear that the project activated unusual dynamics of collaboration and housing coexistence. I wouldn’t thought the municipality’s staff together with the building company would have been fulfilling some kind of locally-based social assistance. In fact, the integration of residents was not only physical but also social and relational. The residents and the construction team crossed each other’s space trajectories, had continuous daily interactions and developed a singular urban coexistence. I surprisingly observed effective neighborhood ties between the team of construction workers, the municipal services overseeing the on-site work, and the residents of the building.
The residents were predominantly elderly individuals, part of a historical working-class community. Most residents were significantly frail and supported by a social worker due to mental, social, or physical challenges that obstructed their daily life. Indeed, the continuous presence of civil servants, engineers, construction workers, and the entire building team created opportunities for residents to seek for practical and social help. R. (86 years old, F) said that they are "all good kids" and she could ask several times for practical tasks like moving furniture or retrieving a cat stuck behind an armchair. E. (82 years old, M) said that it now feels like being back with family, just like when he was a child. What I found particularly valuable was that in this unusual situation of living on a building site, with noise, confusion, dust, and waste storage, residents had the opportunity to be heard, to talk to someone, and to receive a kind of social assistance for different unmet needs, including administrative and digital ones.
I was very enthusiastic to see that help relations were reciprocal: residents played an important role in the progress of the construction works. They acted as proper guardians and controlled the site, providing significant help against risks such as theft of building materials or the access of unauthorized persons. In this way, they gained a different role than merely being beneficiaries of a renovation project and passively receiving a service.
Integrating vulnerable residents into a retrofitting project, which seemed to be a hidden challenge, finally appeared to have a huge potential. The environment I perceived was one of genuine mutual help and intense neighbourhood relations, where actors seized the opportunity not to be bound to social positions and to develop capacities to switch roles Actors engaged in a kind of role-playing that allowed professionals from the design and building fields to learn how to interact with a frail population, playing the role of social workers, while residents assumed roles of responsibility, becoming guardians and social controllers.
A hidden challenge potentiality on the field
At the beginning of 2024, I conducted a secondment at the Department of housing policies at Lisbon City Council. Since I was carrying out research on collaborative housing and innovation, I searched for an experiment in the field of housing to compare with the case I studied in Bologna. The Italian case (co-housing Porto15) had been developed through a public intervention that aimed to build a community of residents that shared spaces and promoted a more sustainable lifestyle in the neighbourhood.
My colleagues from the housing policies department where I was based piqued my interest by telling me about an innovative rehabilitation project that experimented with Tetris to avoid relocating residents into temporary housing. Thus, it aimed to protect the community living there. The construction site was confined to a part of the building while residents continued to live in the remaining part, with the living place and the building site switching in the subsequent phases of the project. This is Vila Romão, an old workers' villa owned by the Municipality of Lisbon, which was undergoing rehabilitation during my secondment due to the precarious conditions of the building.
The municipality of Lisbon and the construction team took on the challenge of integrating residents into the retrofitting project, considering this the most suitable approach to the residents’ needs and life conditions. What was even more interesting was that this challenge concealed another one: the integration of a vulnerable resident population into a retrofitting project.
The municipality faced this challenge by successfully involving individuals with special social skills in the renovation works. The building company carrying on the renovation was unique in agreeing to work under conditions that required extra workload for temporary connections of electricity, gas, and energy, and their maintenance, along with continuous efforts to interact with residents. Additionally, the municipal coordinator of the rehabilitation was explicitly chosen by the municipality for her profile and attitude. She was favourable to working in an environment of close proximity with residents and appreciated human contact.
Upon arriving for my first site visit, it became clear that the project activated unusual dynamics of collaboration and housing coexistence. I wouldn’t thought the municipality’s staff together with the building company would have been fulfilling some kind of locally-based social assistance. In fact, the integration of residents was not only physical but also social and relational. The residents and the construction team crossed each other’s space trajectories, had continuous daily interactions and developed a singular urban coexistence. I surprisingly observed effective neighborhood ties between the team of construction workers, the municipal services overseeing the on-site work, and the residents of the building.
The residents were predominantly elderly individuals, part of a historical working-class community. Most residents were significantly frail and supported by a social worker due to mental, social, or physical challenges that obstructed their daily life. Indeed, the continuous presence of civil servants, engineers, construction workers, and the entire building team created opportunities for residents to seek for practical and social help. R. (86 years old, F) said that they are "all good kids" and she could ask several times for practical tasks like moving furniture or retrieving a cat stuck behind an armchair. E. (82 years old, M) said that it now feels like being back with family, just like when he was a child. What I found particularly valuable was that in this unusual situation of living on a building site, with noise, confusion, dust, and waste storage, residents had the opportunity to be heard, to talk to someone, and to receive a kind of social assistance for different unmet needs, including administrative and digital ones.
I was very enthusiastic to see that help relations were reciprocal: residents played an important role in the progress of the construction works. They acted as proper guardians and controlled the site, providing significant help against risks such as theft of building materials or the access of unauthorized persons. In this way, they gained a different role than merely being beneficiaries of a renovation project and passively receiving a service.
Integrating vulnerable residents into a retrofitting project, which seemed to be a hidden challenge, finally appeared to have a huge potential. The environment I perceived was one of genuine mutual help and intense neighbourhood relations, where actors seized the opportunity not to be bound to social positions and to develop capacities to switch roles Actors engaged in a kind of role-playing that allowed professionals from the design and building fields to learn how to interact with a frail population, playing the role of social workers, while residents assumed roles of responsibility, becoming guardians and social controllers.
Secondments
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Porto 15, a public experiment to foster collaborative housing
Created on 26-01-2024
Context
In contemporary Italy, public housing provision follows two main typologies: edilizia residenziale pubblica (ERP) or "public residential housing", with rents determined by law based on residents’ incomes, and edilizia residenziale sociale - (ERS) or "social residential building" offering affordable rents for individuals who do not meet public housing criteria and cannot access housing in the private market (Storto, 2018; Divari, 2019). The ERS rent is capped, and tenants are selected through a public call. Under this typology, there is a specific fund for ERS housing which also serves social networking purposes. Porto 15 belongs to this stream of projects.
Project
Porto 15 is an ERS development financed through a national call for housing projects from 2015 that aimed to promote housing autonomy for people under 35 by expanding and diversifying the affordable housing provision. The municipality of Bologna was one of the winners of the call. It initiated the housing project in collaboration with two other public bodies: the municipal welfare service provider and the regional public housing manager. The public institutions’ aim was to address housing demand and promote collaborative living as a desirable housing model among young people.
Collaborative housing in Italy is mainly based on private property, long-term investment and selective communities (Rogel, 2018). This category of housing can encompass cohousing, residents’ cooperatives, solidarity condominium and eco-villages, among other. Porto 15 represents a pioneering experiment in collaborative housing, expanding access to it through a public rental scheme. This scheme responds to the co-housing category, by keeping private space to a minimum and complementing it with shared living spaces. In this case, the ‘co’ not only signifies mutual help relationships among tenants but also reflects collective efforts in networking to promote a collaborative housing culture in the neighbourhood (Calastri, 2013).
In the Porto 15 experiment, future residents received 40 hours of training aimed at fostering group cohesion. The selection process entailed studying candidates’ motivations and profiles to create a socially mixed diverse community, including individuals with specific fragilities such as migration background, disability, and integration difficulties. Residents’ origins are diverse, including Syria, Peru, Russia, Spain, Morocco and various regions of Italy. The intention was to extend beyond a self-contained community, selecting individuals based on their motivation to build social ties beyond their homes. Currently, the co-housing accommodates 25 adults and 12 children. Prospective residents were encouraged to establish an association, disseminate the positive implications of the collaborative housing model, and facilitate sense-making processes regarding the values and principles that underpin this type of housing.
The housing development occupies a portion of a historic building dating back to 1914 which underwent a renovation to be repurposed as a co-housing facility. It comprises eighteen units, consisting of 9 two-bedroom and 9 three-bedroom apartments, along with a shared apartment and a multipurpose room. The premises also include a courtyard and communal spaces in the basements. Rent is set at a standard rate of seven euros per square meter, approximately 300 euros per month, depending on the apartment size. This stands in stark contrast to the average of eighteen euros per square meter in the private housing market within the central districts of Bologna, a city facing significant housing pressure.
Co-housing and tenant – landlord relations: changing postures?
In Italy, recipients of public housing have traditionally been viewed as beneficiaries of either monetary subsidies for rent and bills or public house for living. The prevailing approach by public management perceived these individuals as users with uniform needs, leading to the delivery of standardised services to satisfy them. (Andersen & Pors, 2016). However, a “governance metatrend” (Mortensen et al., 2020) is emerging, fostering a hybridization of roles for service providers and users, encouraging co-production, capacity-building, and a mutual learning perspective. With Porto 15, the public administration seeks to transform itself into an enabler and a place-maker, striving to create a space for opportunities, not just in physical terms but also socially. This marks a shift in attitude towards public housing residents, who are now actively engaged in creating and collaborating, rather than passively receiving social benefits. In Porto 15, public bodies are shaping a new social dynamic by adopting a strength-based approach to social welfare (Price et al., 2020).
In the final phase of the building renovation, as the group of dwellers was being formed, future residents participated in the co-design of the basements together with the architects. They collectively decided to incorporate a bicycle repair workshop, a shared laundry, communal storage and a music practice room in that space.
After the group came together, irregular contact with the public service provider resulted in an interaction based on questions/answers or problem/solution, resembling a landlord-tenant relationship rather than the intended horizontal collaboration. Paradoxically, this gap created an open space for innovation, allowing the co-housing group to take a proactive role. The group established a self-managed network, which was acknowledged by public authorities.
In its inaugural year, the Porto 15 community engaged with twenty-seven different associations, took part in twenty-one projects (leading one), and organized various public events. All of these initiatives received endorsement from both the municipal welfare service provider and the municipality, serving as showcases for the collaborative housing model. Notably, the association joined the “European Collaborative Housing Day” in 2022, also hosting activities from local groups in the shared spaces.
Co-housing in the local urban regulation: a transformative impact?
Porto 15 played a pivotal role in shaping the first normative definition of co-housing in Bologna, setting an example for the entire country. While collaborative housing was vaguely mentioned in a 2014 regional law as an “integrated solution for local communities to meet their goals”, the Bologna building code introduced more precise principles for “collaborative and solidarity-based housing”. These principles explicitly aim to prevent speculation and promote environmental sustainability, fostering homogenisation among emerging projects falling under the co-housing label. Households involved in such projects are required to adhere to building and environmental sustainability principles. Additionally, they must actively participate in community actions, engage in the design and management of common spaces, share practices within the neighbourhood, and organize public events.
Co-housing offspring in Bologna: a generative effect?
The Housing Plan of Bologna incorporates a dedicated section for the development of new “collaborative and solidarity-based” public projects in the city, drawing inspiration from the pilot project of Porto 15. The emergence of second generation co-housing projects started with the Salus Space in 2019, a “collaborative village” funded by the European Union and characterized by a diverse governance model endorsed by the municipality.
This new wave of projects aims to forge connections between collaborative housing and various policies, shaping a fresh narrative around collaborative housing. These policies prioritize environmental sustainability, with an upcoming co-housing project focusing on creating the first community energy collective for nearly zero-energy self-consumption in a public building. The second area of intervention emphasizes community building with an intergenerational and intersectional dimension, along with the development of a collaborative condominium. The third planned intervention involves awareness initiatives within co-housing for young people and families, promoting efforts against organized crime.
The overarching goal is to create a lasting inventory of affordable social housing, serving as a social catalyst for the territory. The residents of Porto 15 plan to contribute to this vision by sharing their expertise with future residents of other collaborative projects. This will involve organizing conferences, extending invitations to shared activities, and participating in events organized by future co-housing groups.
Public housing production in Italy faces the challenge of establishing secure financial channels. To achieve this goal, municipalities must devise solutions utilizing a range of financial resources, spanning from European to municipal levels, to ensure the successful development of collaborative housing projects. Looking forward, key strategies will entail incentivizing private investors to invest in social housing development and fostering a reflection on the role of social cooperation in affordable housing provision.
Collaborative Housing
Social Innovation
Area: Policy and financing
Collaborative housing
According to the definition given to this umbrella term by Czischke, Cariou and Lang (2021), collaborative housing (CH) encompasses various housing typologies in which collaboration between residents and stakeholders of housing production is central. These authors stressed the importance of the term for conceptualizing a wide range of housing provision forms that present different interactions between traditional housing actors such as public authorities, private developers and/or non for profit organizations, together with future residents. These collaborative endeavours include different degrees of collective self-organisation or participation of residents to this collaborative process of housing provision and subsequent housing management.
The academic literature presents CH as re-emerging since the 2000s in Europe in response to contemporary societal challenges such as housing affordability, better environmental practices (Czischke et al., 2020; Fromm, 2012; Lang et al., 2020; Tummers, 2016) and in some cases, social inclusion, stimulated by public policies . The model is therefore considered to be a potential answer to the affordability crisis, since collaborative processes in conjunction with particular tenure statuses could allow for savings in construction and management costs as, well as energy (Brysch & Czischke, 2021). Additionally, these models of co-creation of housing solutions address environmental challenges through several resource saving practices of eco-engineering (Tummers, 2016).
In conjunction to the development of such new practices of housing provision, collaborative housing has become a growing research area for of interest for different disciplines, from urban planning to housing studies, public health and environmental studies (Brysch & Czischke, 2021; Czischke et al., 2020; Fromm, 2012; Lang et al., 2020).
CH draws inspiration from a wide range of self-organised housing forms, such as “resident-led cooperatives, cohousing, eco-villages, Community Land Trusts (CLTs)””, acknowledging collaboration among residents and with external stakeholders as a common thread (Lang et al., 2020, p. 1). However, unlike cohousing(Czischke et al., 2020), this is not always a bottom-up community-based initiative. The term collaborative housing refers to a broader spectrum encompassing also ‘’coliving’’ or commercial shared rental housing (Ronald et al., 2023), that are market-driven and prioritize profit oriented capital production through short-term rentals catering to remote working elite or middle-class individuals (Bergan et al., 2021).
Therefore, the conceptualization of collaborative housing invites researchers to question differences and similarities of these new and wide set of practices with more established forms. Cohousing is such a case in point, since it stands for a set of guiding values and principles such as : collective solidarity and autonomous decision-making (Labit, 2013), co- design of the future homes,sharing decisions, spaces and facilities. The physical design is conceived to enhance social interactions, therefore it usually involves multifunctional rooms, laundry facilities, bike repair shops, children's playrooms, and guest rooms, as well as green spaces like courtyards, gardens, or plots (Durrett & McCamant, 2011).
In addition to finding out if collaborative housing still promotes these core principles of cohousing, it raises the question of the possibility to overcome some of the limitations of previous models. Some scholars have raised concerns about the accessibility of cohousing projects, both financially and culturally, based on the small participation of vulnerable groups with financial difficulties (Ruiu, 2015) and the rare presence of individuals with low cultural resources (Bresson, 2016). Fighting the risk of becoming a social elitist community, CH can act as a support for sustainable urban development through more collective forms of tenure, ownership, and land use (Jarvis, 2011) and can play an important role in revitalising neighbourhoods (Fromm, 2012). It can facilitate more social interactions (Williams, 2005) organising activities and social gathering opportunities for the neighbourhood, and can influence the adoption of more sustainable practices and ways of life. From a social capital theory perspective, CH, just like cohousing, can therefore produce social impact in terms of strengthening bonding social capital within the internal community, and bridging social capital with neighboring communities (Ruiu, 2016).
While CH has emerged as an alternative housing solution, its success remains confined to a niche from a quantitative standpoint (Droste, 2015) but its potential for scaling up is bigger than in the case of cohousing, because of the involvement of traditional actors of housing provision. Since state-driven initiatives are emerging in certain European countries, as documented by Bressons and Labit in France or in Italy[1], and using the self-management and reciprocity dynamics brought by collaborative housing to balance the lack of welfare, CH appears to be a relevant model for more inclusive housing provision. In this perspective, it could also facilitate inclusion of socio-economically vulnerable people (Ruiu, 2015), although introducing concerns about the actual possibility for these groups to perceive themselves as agents of their own housing situation (Czischke et al., 2020) and contribute to the upstream phases of collaboration for housing co-creation.
Created on 11-06-2024
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“Social innovation is a contested concept with multiple meanings that have implications beyond academia” (Ayob et al., 2016, p. 1). Since the global economic crisis of 2008, the European Union policies and programmes increased their focus on social issues. Subsequently promoted by the European political agenda (Hubert, 2010), social innovation has become a norm in public policy on social issues. In addition, social innovation is also a fast-growing field of research. Academics dated the present use of the term back to the 1970s and the revolutionary context of the post-1968 student movements, when it stood for a more democratic way of engaging with problems such as social exclusion, lack of wellbeing, deprivation and alienation (Chambon et al., 1982; Moulaert et al., 2010, 2013). As an alternative to dysfunctional and cumbersome existing top-down mechanisms, social innovation meant more bottom-up, community-based, participative and creative ways of addressing social problems. From this perspective, social innovation is still marked at present by the values of social movements, such as emancipation and recognition of the equality of rights between people. It aims for transformative impact on dominant social structures and decision-making.
However, since the 1970s, social innovation progressively lost its revolutionary dimensions, and became a buzzword, as it was used extensively in both policy and research. At present, a single definition cannot encompass the inflation of agendas and of collective actions under this umbrella term. According to a broad approach, social innovation consists of “new ideas that meet unmet needs” (Mulgan, 2019), or of creative solutions to social problems that challenge established or institutional practices. This wide understanding opens the way to cross-fertilisation with fields where innovation processes are more established, such as economic and socio-technical innovation (Baregheh et al., 2009). Thus from a multi-disciplinary perspective, social innovation stands for the introduction of new products, services and processes that change the established way of doing things in the social field (Raynor, 2019; Westley et al., 2014), such as more efficient and more cost-effective procedures. The main difference that makes social innovation stand out from innovative practices in other areas is the combination of both a social focus and a social scope: “innovations that are social both in their ends and their means. New ideas that aim simultaneously to meet socially recognized needs and to create new relationships that enhance society’s capacity to act” (Mulgan, 2019).
Nevertheless, certain social innovation scholars have deplored the dominance of “economic and technologist interpretations and applications of innovation” and of a managerial understanding that is reductionist, over-simplistic and promotes the autocracy of best practices (Moulaert et al., 2013, pp. 13, 18). Therefore, they felt the need to develop a critical stance, considering that in dominant innovation and development agendas, market principles take precedence over non-commercial outcomes, such as empowerment, emancipation and the reconfiguration of power relations. For them social innovation “refers to an ethical position of social justice” and its essence still lies in its transformative outcomes in terms of improving social relations at different levels, from micro relations between people to structures of governance, through empowerment and involvement in decision-making processes (Moulaert et al., 2013, pp. 16–17). From this perspective, social innovation research, should be considered as an analytical concept and as an objective itself. This perspective opens the way to a whole field of transdisciplinary research that explores knowledge production between research and action (Novy et al., 2013).
The two perspectives on social innovation outlined above, the social justice oriented one and the managerial one, reflect, on one hand, a transformative orientation and, on the other, a functional orientation (Laville et al., 2014). The transformative perspective looks at collective actions from the prism of promoting alternative practices, progressive values towards empowerment and social justice (Vicari Haddock & Tornaghi, 2013), whereas the functional focuses on the mechanisms of an alternative provision of goods, processes and services, considered as a remedy for public failures in the social field. Therefore, the functional approach focuses on “social business” and its pragmatic approach to integrating the market economy, with a management-based logic that uses social innovation as a way to create new markets, competitive advantages and new business opportunities (Laville et al., 2014).
The two approaches are also present in the field of housing studies. The functionalist one addresses particularly the topics of social services and social integration related to access to housing, with a focus on the roles of citizens and of civic organizations, strongly linked and fuelled by values of social movements (Vicari Haddock & Tornaghi, 2013). These endeavours contain a criticism from a transformative perspective about the privatization of services and of the rolling-back of the welfare state from social policies, embedded in the understanding of social innovation as a way to modernize welfare services provision by involving the private and third sector and by diminishing public funding (Martinelli, 2013). It also designates social services around housing, directed towards vulnerable groups in society or the homeless, or production-consumption practices related to housing management (Marchesi & Tweed, 2021).
Even if the functionalist approach described above is well suited for the analysis of the new forms of provision of sustainable and affordable housing, in housing studies the term of social innovation is very seldom used in relation to housing production. It is replaced by “social enterprise” for naming the use of non-governmental, market-based approaches for the production of social and affordable housing (Czischke et al., 2012). Social enterprise is at the heart of the change in the profile of affordable housing providers who moved away from the public sphere and integrated resources and skills from the market and community. A whole area of housing literature focuses on the large diversity of social purpose organisations, third sector actors operating on a non-profit distribution basis and providing affordable housing in different national contexts. The dominant perspective for characterising this diversity has been “hybridity” and “hybridisation” of organizational forms, encompassing characteristics of public, market and civil society in varying combinations (Mullins et al., 2012; Smith, 2010). The few cases that use social innovation as an entry point for analysis, do so when they focus on the processes of resources assemblage, scaling-up and scaling-out of pilot projects that introduce alternative housing solutions especially in the area of combatting homelessness (Raynor, 2019).
While the scientific literature has made few links between the scientific concept of social innovation and housing production, there is a strong connection between social innovation and the territorial dimension of housing (MacCallum et al., 2009; Moulaert et al., 2010). European policies have played a pivotal role in connecting social innovation to urban regeneration efforts, particularly through the European Commission's urban area-based programmes of the 1990s and 2000s, such as the Urban Pilot Projects and Urban programmes, which promoted an integrated approach to urban development and area-based interventions. These neighbourhood-centred development policies built on the potential of local communities to support development and local improvement projects, with an endogenous drive. Subsequently, researchers in urban planning have taken on board the concept of social innovation in order to analyse governance outcomes of urban development and the configuration of arenas of participation for local citizen organizations in urban decision-making processes (Healey, 2007).
Created on 05-06-2024
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