Living Together: Research Project Report

Living Together forms part of a wider doctoral research investigation by Rebecca Roke that explores the role and impact of shared resources in Melbourne’s collective housing. For RMIT PlaceLab, the research scope drew on the broader themes and findings of this PhD with a focus on case study housing within the neighbourhoods of Brunswick and Brunswick East. These inner northern suburbs of Melbourne are active sites of collective housing: earlier developments, such as The Commons1 by Nightingale Housing (2013), began to set precedents in Melbourne, and Australia, for how housing at density may be designed and procured differently to typical speculative, market-led models.

The research should be read in the context of a measurable increase of collective housing in Melbourne’s middle-ring suburbs since 2010 (Giannini 2011). Instead of focusing on dwellings as purely speculative financial tools, collective models aim to offer alternative housing strategies that encourage durable social networks and sustainable living practices based on an attitude towards sharing (Jarvis 2011). A principal intention behind collective housing, also known in Australia as deliberative development (Alves 2020; Riley 2018; Sharam et al. 2015), is a greater reliance on shared resources. Its expression borrows from international precedents, such as Danish co-housing (Bofællesskaber), German Baugruppe, and Swiss models of cooperative housing. The approach to sharing encompasses three principal areas: land, social capital, and amenities.

This study identifies the integral notion of sharing in collective housing as an ‘economy of shared resources’ and aims to understand how this occurs in projects – and to what lived effect. The approach borrows from a growing area of design knowledge, social value, which considers the relation between human life and form, as investigated by pioneers including Jan Gehl (Wagner 2017) and Flora Samuel (RIBA and Hay 2016; Samuel 2022; Serin et al. 2018). Sharing typically occurs at a range of scales and in different ways. For example, collective housing usually produces private homes that are smaller than average homes on a comparable sized land plot; incorporate areas given over to shared open or planted spaces; and include common facilities, such as multi?purpose shared rooms, shared laundries, or shared productive gardens. Many collective models also encourage active property management by residents that invites decision-making by consensus (Jarvis 2011). The overall effect aims to inspire connection between residents, and by extension, the creation of a sense of community – or neighbourliness – within a housing complex.

In Australia, the rising popularity and occurrence of collective housing types is mostly seen by residents as a means to buy a home, with an emphasis on quality at a more achievable purchase or rental cost than a speculative counterpart. Equally, collective housing buyers share a distinctive focus on buying a home with above-average environmental performance and construction standards, a heightened sense of community interaction, and (most often for smaller scale developments) collaborative decision-making. Overall, the driving interest for those adopting a different approach to housing is, arguably, to collocate cost and lifestyle choice; balancing quality of life in the context of Australia’s rising housing unaffordability (Apps et al. 2021; Ferguson et al. 2016; Infrastructure Victoria 2023; Parkinson et al. 2019).

This research project seeks to integrate observations and findings of the built and social environments, adopting three case studies in Merri-bek as the means to examine this: Davison Collaborative (2020), Nightingale Evergreen (2022) and Balfe Park Lane (2021). Shared resources are explored through relationships between the built environment – the integral design decisions that shape the physical provision of housing – and the residents’ lived experience. Together, the research considers how, and if, shared resources of collective housing impact on the everyday experiences of residents.