Design co-op responses to counter housing crisis
Filipa Serpa has an Architecture and Urban Planning Degree (FA-UTL, 2000) with specialisation in Urban and Environmental Regeneration (FA-UTL, 2002) and PhD in Urbanism addressing the public promoted housing projects in Lisbon (FA-ULisboa, 2015). In 2010 and in 2011 received a Honourable Mention in Young Researchers Award, promoted by UTL/CGD, in the field of Architecture / Urban Planning and in 2016 a Merit Award for the best PhD Thesis on Urbanism for 2014/2015 academic year, promoted by the University of Lisbon (ULisboa). Collaborates with the Lisbon School of Architecture, ULisboa since 2000, is Associate Professor in the Urbanism Project Department and is an integrated researcher at the Research Centre for Architecture, Urbanism and Design (CIAUD) with interest in Housing and Public Space. Coordinates a postgraduate training course on Innovation in Housing promoted by FA-ULisboa and between June 2023 and September 2024 served as Vice-President of the Executive Board of the Institute of Housing and Urban Rehabilitation.
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Tiago Mota Saraiva is an architect, urbanist, and founding partner at Ateliermob / Working with the 99%. Over the past two decades, his practice has been deeply engaged with participatory processes, community-led design, and cooperative housing in Portugal. He has advised municipalities and institutions on housing policy and is a vocal advocate for structural public support of collective forms of living. Tiago has taught, published, and curated extensively on architecture, urban politics and territory.
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Filipa Serpa and Tiago Mota Saraiva, with Julia Albani and Nuno Cera, are working on a worldwide research on housing cooperative movements and public policies that enhanced it.
In Lisbon, during 2024, the average tenant spent 52% of its global income to rent a house. In Berlin, over 200,000 families remain on waiting lists for affordable housing. In Los Angeles, more than 75,000 people sleep on the streets each night. These are not isolated crises. They are interconnected expressions of a global housing emergency, shaped by decades of commodification, public disinvestment, and real estate speculation. Housing has become the most traded asset class in the world, and millions are still without a proper place to live. According to OECD, over 150 million people are homeless globally. 1.6 billion people currently live in inadequate housing worldwide (UN Habitat).
We have to move forward, and work beyond diagnosis: What responses are possible when citizens take the lead and institutions collaborate?
Worldwide cooperative housing models based on collective ownership and democratic governance are reclaiming the meaning of “home”; more than property. They are infrastructures of care, participation, and urban resilience. The power of citizen-led cooperative initiatives, not only as reaction but as construction.
How can public policies enhance and stimulate these movements?
Without access to land, long-term financing, or supportive legal frameworks, many cooperatives remain vulnerable or non-replicable. What public policies do co-op housing movements need?
We advocate a strategic shift: public policy must evolve to become an enabler of collective agency. This requires mapping and synthesizing effective policy tools: land trusts, cooperative leasehold models, ethical banking partnerships, and participatory planning frameworks. Rather than centralized housing provision, we propose a distributed ecology of support, where institutions recognize and invest in community-led capacity.
This is a call for architects, curators, policymakers, governments and citizens to see housing cooperatives as a living strategy toward long-term and systemic change.