Living Collectively

The RAD housing project offers one small way to contribute to prefiguring better futures by providing opportunities to live collectively in ways that help us to practice commoning by embracing unexpected outcomes of our participatory processes as they emerge from the collective efforts of those who show up.

Relational Scaffolding

The Transition to Stewardship model is a tool for redirecting pooled financial resources towards collectively stewarding climate resilient housing. This model relies on the cost savings that can be unlocked by multiple people living together in higher-density than suburban expectations. It may also provide other benefits, including helping to lower consumption, reduce waste, combat isolation, and be more intentional with our acts of solidarity. However, these benefits do not necessarily follow from simply living in proximity with each other.

To live together in ways that generate collective well-being, we can’t rely on proximity or legal structures. We need to actively build the distributed networks of relationships within which we can take care of one another and our environments. This effort includes everything from the administrative hurdles of participating in decision-making processes to the personal and interpersonal unlearning required to navigate conflict well within emergent group dynamics.

Building our capacity to relate well together takes intention and practice. For example, practising more intentional ways of navigating small-tensions within groups can help create a more caring and collaborative relational space from which to navigate inevitable conflicts as they emerge.

To implement this model we will need intentional approaches to collectively stewarding common resources. Of the broader set of relational practices that enable living stewardship of resources more generally, there are some specific considerations that are highlighted by the RAD housing approach.

Project-Group Balance

Implementing RAD housing is likely to need to balance the tensions between the project of acquiring, retrofitting, and maintaining the infrastructure needed for collaborative housing and the group dynamics of the participants who emerges to collectively steward these houses over time.

The difficulty of balancing tensions between participating in good group processes and designing and implementing projects for collective benefit are well documented (and intersect with a range of other variable dimensions of collaborative housing options).

While the distinction between group-first and project-first approaches to collaborative housing is ambiguous in practice I want to present a caricature of group-first and project-first approaches to highlight the respective benefits and challenges contributing to this tension.

In this caricature, group-first approaches prioritise forming a group-identity that shapes the relational practices and infrastructure of their collaborative housing infrastructure. For example, some groups form by carefully building the relational scaffolding needed to live together and then collectively design the physical infrastructure to house their group-members. This approach offers an opportunity for co-creating collective-living infrastructure for those with an existing group of people who are able jump ‘all in’ on an uncertain journey together. One of the challenges group-first approaches can face is the difficulty of maintaining the initial shared-identify as the configuration of participants change over time.

In contrast, project-first approaches tend to prioritise project of designing a specific housing infrastructure for collaborative living practices and letting the group emerge as participate choose to help realise this vision (and/or leave) along the way. One challenge in this approach is that when participants are motivated by the outcome of acquiring a house in a collaborative living space, rather then a commitment to the collective well-being of the group, they may burn-out on amount of relational work that emerges in learning to live collectively with people they otherwise may not have known. At the same time, this approach has provided an accessible pathway into more collaborative approaches to housing for many people.

Caricatures aside, many approaches allow for the group and the project to emerge together. Building on lessons from many of these, RAD housing outlines a transitional processes that can support a collective’s emerging project-vision as well as allow for the dynamic group processes that will need to emerge between those who show-up and participate in implementing - and potentially changing - those visions in practice.

For instance, a RAD housing collective can be driven forward by an emergent group focused on designing and implementing the next stage of a broader project (of stewarding climate-resilient housing spread across multiple properties) rather than attempting to co-create a stable vision of a specific ‘forever home’ configuration.

Each implementation of this transitional process needs to find a sustainable balance between group and project needs. This includes ensuring sustained efforts drive the project towards the next step in the journey of acquiring, retrofitting, and living across multiple properties, while also maintaiing processes that allow for participation in emergent group dynamics between those who show-up and participate to change the project along the way.

Commoning

One way to navigate the project-group balance is to start practising commoning. Building on the noun of ‘commons’ for those spaces that are collectively stewarded for the benefit of all participants, the verb commoning draws attention to the dynamic actions required to co-create commons in ways that contribute to opening up possibilities for how we care for each other and our environments.

In this view, commons are not just external resources but an expression of how we act together. As such, practising commoning also helps us shift away from treating common spaces as predefined containers for specific types of pre-determined relations. Releasing these pre-determined expectations, we can shift towards a view of commons as emerging from dynamic systems of relations that continually re-create collectively stewarded spaces.

This process of commoning also offers a way to practice how we relate to each other across our differences, and a way to contribute to changing structures by changing ourselves. In the context of RAD housing, creating explicit process that support us to practice commoning offers one way to balance emergent group-project dynamics.

Swarming on the Retrofit

One example of an explicit process for balancing emergent group-project dynamics is already built into the transition-to-stewardship model process for ‘swarming’ on the retrofit stage of each property within a multi-house collective.

This notion of ‘swarming’ includes the expectation that more people will contribute to acquiring and retrofitting each house than will eventually live in that specific house. The more participants able to swarm on each house, the sooner the collective is able to afford an additional house to put into the retrofitting and decommodifying pipeline - ensuring that all participants are able to be directly housed eventually. For example, if a group of 18 people ‘swarm’ their collective efforts to acquire a 3-bedroom property and retrofit it into one with 8 bedrooms across two dwellings, less than half the group will be housed there once established. However, as more properties are retrofitted this creates 12 dwelling of established housing across 5 properties – more than enough for the initial 18 people plus the additional ~30 participants who joined later on in the project.

To implement this ‘swarming’ approach, each collective will need explicit processes for deciding which participants are prioritised as residents when rooms in established properties become available. To fit with RAD housing goals, these prioritising criteria should not be tied to financial or labour contributions. For example, if we want to ensure that housing-access is not limited to those able to live in a building site, then the set of folk who end up living in each established house does not default to those who choose to live there during the retrofit stage. To avoid the expectations of ongoing residence following a retrofit, each collective will need processes to decide who lives on properties during the retrofitting period, who lives on those same properties once they are established, and when and how these decisions are made.

Multi-property collectives

Another way in which RAD housing requires a balance in emergent group-project dynamics are the expectations to collectively steward a range of different retrofitted house configurations across multiple properties.

One way to explore these different directions is by articulating ‘house themes’ that describe the characteristics of each housing site in ways that create a bold constraint on participation based on a given set of priorities. These constraints provide a pathway for people within the collective to self-organise into compatible living situations in ways that are about housing-priorities (rather than relying on default assumptions such as first-in-best-dressed or who-you-know). Ensuring a diverse array of house themes across a collective also also offers pathways for us to individually and collectively adapt to changes in the housing needs and priorities within the collective over time.

Including a range of different themes are established across a multi-site collective diverse living arrangements that might be incompatible within a more closely co-located housing collective can emerge For example, a collectives might include a site with the theme of ‘becoming an inclusive community-hub for climate resilience’ as well as another site that focuses on the theme of ‘creating a high-security organising space for resistance activists’.

Themes might also be articulated to help navigate different accessibility needs or social and communication practices. For example, while some participants may choose to live on a property that is tailored (through both structural and relational choices) to enable hosting community gatherings others may seek out the relative calm of a property that prioritises sensory-sensitive friendly spaces.

Having multiple properties with different features also allows housing configerations to be re-considered as housing needs change over time. For example, themes that create constraints around the degree of generational interaction include establishing ‘multi-generational living practices’ by encouraging participation across all age groups, while another may experiment with ‘being an autonomous space for young adults’, and another may focus on creating space for adults of all ages to have child-free time.

There are a lots of questions to be considered around when an established house is ’themed’, when and how a given house-theme might change, and who is involved in those decisions - and these would each need to be determined by each collective. For now the point to emphasise is that the practice of navigating the emerging relational dynamics is crucial for both within-house collective living, and across-property practices of stewarding these houses for broader benefit. Given this, we expect it will be important to cap each collective at a size that supports high-trust relationships while allowing flexibility in living arrangements (<50 people). To pay-it-forward, any more-established collectives can support emerging projects seeking to retrofit and decommodify more housing. This approach also allows for the possibility several RAD housing collectives may emerge with distinct directions that can, in turn, help to cultivate dynamics that support the project-group balance of each collective.

Participating in living collectively

Another key aspect of the emerging relational dynamics in multi-property collectives is navigating the different decision-making processes needed within and across houses. This includes an appreciation that some decisions impact multiple housing sites, while others only impact one property, or a single house, or even one of the various spaces within a house. Each of these decision types may also differ depending on the relevant streams within the process of transitioning to stewardship. Other factors include how often agreements need to be reviewed to ensure shared expectations can change as new perspectives emerge.

The options for how we make decisions together are embedded within the broader governance practices that structure our relationships. Within colonial contexts, capitalism pressures us to default to ways of relating that perpetuate broader oppressive structures. To resist this, we need to get better at exploring, calibrating, and articulating shared expectations around each aspect of participation in collective practices.

Therefore, instead of prescribing a specific approach to making decisions, RAD housing collectives are expected to co-create their own processes for determining who makes what decisions, when.

At the same time, processes for co-creating collective practices need not be built from scratch. There are many existing resources for supporting such practices, and lessons from housing collectives implementing the RAD housing approach are likely to be shared openly for other to adapt for their own contexts.

It is through intentional approaches to living collectively that RAD housing projects offer pathways towards supporting broader efforts to decommodify our basic needs, decolonise our ways of relating, and act in solidarity with more radical movements for justice.