Collaborative Housing for Chile: Approaching Multidimensional Housing Deficits

Nowadays in Chile, the need for housing is growing rapidly. Current housing challenges go beyond satisfying quantitative and qualitative deficits but extend to deficits in the social dimension concerning for example social cohesion, solidarity, reciprocal relationships, social capital, mutual help and community life. Different studies developed around the world propose the re-conceptualization of Collaborative Housing (CH) as a collective housing alternative, led by (a group of) residents organised in combination with stakeholders, that among its drivers and features consider the aforementioned social issues, to address urgent issues in today's society. CH initiatives are characterized by a high level of participation of society and allow local communities and residents to produce their housing with help of the third sector, non-profit organizations, NGOs, and community organizations. Currently, in Chile, as well as in Europe, we recognize the interest in developing collective initiatives such as co‐operatives and projects of "self-management" and "self-building". However, the scientific evidence showing whether CH initiatives can solve part of the social deficit of housing has not been found before. Therefore, this paper seeks to determine the opportunities and shortcomings of CH forms when addressing the social housing deficit (as defined in this article). The methods used are a Delphi method to survey a group of residents living in CH projects and a global systematic literature review on the multidimensional (quantitative, qualitative, social) deficits of housing and on collaborative housing, where the literature is classified and categorized as either hypothetical, theoretical, or empirical evidence of the opportunities and limitations of Collaborative Housing to respond to social aspects of housing. The initial results of the research are exploratory and form the hypothesis that CH could have advantages over the traditional Latin American housing model (e.g. Chilean model) since it considers social aspects of housing.