Alternative forms of living: Developing a community-led housing network in Wales

This project aimed to set the foundations for the creation of a community-led housing network in Wales, recognising the existing experience, expectations and concerns of different stakeholders as the bedrock for future discussions and research in the field.

We planned a series of Community-led Housing workshops held at the Welsh School of Architecture between March and June 2024. These workshops provoked excitement in demonstrating how Community-led Housing can deliver quality homes within sustainable and healthy communities. They laid the foundation for establishing partnerships to work on three key themes:

Benefits and Affordability: delivering inclusive mixed-tenure homes set within resilient communities
Planning and Finance: the challenges of creating innovate housing within public structures that have not been designed to support such collaborative development, particularly in terms of planning and finance.
Design and Governance: how the physical design of a project is linked to the needs of a group in particular geographical settings and the democratic processes that can realise these aspirations.

The workshops confronted and complemented the experiences of people involved in the processes of envisioning, designing, planning, supporting and living in community-led housing projects. They laid the groundwork for a community-led housing network in Wales, considering the existing experiences, expectations and concerns of different stakeholders for future research.

Conversations held with participants raised questions around three broad areas that outline a future research agenda on Community-led Housing:

Why do it? Why do groups engage in CLH? Why is this being done in Wales? What are the benefits for groups and the wider society?
How is it done? How is CLH currently delivered? How can statutory bodies support it?
What makes it work? What brings together the community in CLH? What design elements make this work?