Decommodification of housing and commoning care: Potential of collective property in mitigating the care gap

Housing cooperatives are a successful mechanism for providing affordable housing in cities facing acute housing shortages. Based on common property and collective governance, the vast majority of non-profit housing cooperatives facilitate the processes of decommodifying urban land and commoning housing (Balmer & Gerber, 2017). In many countries, governments support housing cooperatives by making public land and direct financial backing available as an affordable housing policy (Ferreri & Vidal, 2022; Barenstein et al., 2022). At the project level, municipal authorities can also facilitate the production of indoor and outdoor common spaces for care functions (Tummers & Macgregor 2019). These spaces serve for collective uses of the residents and public authorities ensure their provision through special land use plans as a project-based planning instrument. Collectivization of property and housing governance creates windows of opportunity for renegotiating care work more democratically within a group of residents rather than household-level gendered division of labour (Hayden, 1980). In this paper, we explore the potential of commoning housing through a cooperative model for enabling a community of residents that collectivizes not only the management of housing as shelter but also the maintenance of everyday life, i.e., the process of social reproduction. We interpret housing commons as going beyond a collection of private units “in saturated space” (Huron, 2015), constituting a community of users that maintain housing while also providing access to spaces for social reproduction, more specifically, care. Using a critical institutionalist approach (Cleaver & De Koning, 2015), we ask how the planning interventions together with public and private interests shape the spatial organization of childcare through public, market-based, and community-based provision mechanisms in the context of housing cooperatives. Empirically speaking, we take two young housing cooperatives in Bern, Switzerland (Heubergas and Warmbächli) and conduct a comparative analysis of the dependencies between commodified and decommodified care and the implications of these dependencies for maintaining housing as a commons. Our preliminary results indicate that the decommodification of land is necessary but not sufficient for collectivizing care work and commoning care beyond the gendered unpaid labour. These findings also demonstrate the limits to commoning housing in situations where care remains a commodity provisioned in commercial space enabled by cooperative housing projects.