Affordable Housing Through Cooperative Urbanism Shared Amsterdam | Affordable Housing through Cooperative Urbanism

Dutch housing organizations ensure that more than 2.4 million households have access to adequate and affordable housing aimed at improving the quality of life for the low and middle-income communities. While the proportion of affordable housing has continued to remain a national priority in the Netherlands and is the highest in Europe, the owner occupancy rate is still below the set European standards due to the absence of middle-income dwellings for rent, home-ownership or cooperative housing, unoccupied surplus accumulation by housing associations and unaffordability of social dwellings. Given the current trends in urbanization, McKinsey Global Institute (2014) contends that the affordable housing gap would increase form 330 million urban households to 440 million affecting 1.6 billion people who cannot secure a minimum acceptable housing unit for 30 percent of their annual income leading to an increase in affordability gap (the difference in amount between the income affordable for a housing unit by the low income groups and the actual development cost of the housing unit) and substandard living conditions. Due to growing shortage based on migration and income trends, McKinsey and Company (2014) contends that by 2025 households will either be 'financially stretched by housing costs' or be living in 'crowded, inadequate and unsafe housing.' This paper has two principal objectives. Firstly, it explores the key regional trends in housing policies affecting affordability with a particular emphasis on housing type, tenure, target groups, providers and financing structures embedded in four social housing contexts-Austria, France, Germany and The Netherlands. In doing so, it analyzes affordability challenges and access to improved social housing across the countries to position the proposed urban concept of 'Cooperative Urbanism'. After that, the four cost reduction levers as proposed by McKinsey and Company (2014) to the global affordable housing challenge are applied to connect policy level implications to strategic urban planning initiatives. Secondly, this paper explores cooperative urbanism whereby through the lens of critical urban theory (Brenner, N. 2009) it proposes shared participation deploying collaborative city gaming and design thinking as innovative methods to generate strategic urban planning and design instruments that tackle the provision of affordable housing challenge in Amsterdam. To that end, the strategies formulated enhance and support differentiated housing supply and demand driven programming to leverage mainstream participation that is empowering to all, particularly to the lower income groups incentivizing citizens as collaborators, facilitators and managers to negotiate and empower others as agents of change. The paper further recommends to explore and test cooperative urbanism as future research to underpin and analyze local participation deploying new spatial paradigms to contribute in rethinking planning and policy initiatives in achieving affordable housing solutions under rapid urban, social and economic transformations.