On the 10th of July 2018 we presentated results from our COPHAB (Housing Co-production) project at the international workshop Inclusive Collaborative Housing Futures: towards an international agenda, which was held at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. The workshop programme, organised and chaired by Dr Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia (University of Lancaster) included presentations by key scholars on collaborative housing across Europe. Our paper, titled ‘Inclusive Collaborative Housing Futures: a view from housing co-production in Catalonia’, was part of the session ‘Socio-economic access and inclusivity: life course, social practices and technologies’, which debated inclusivity in the emergence and maintenance of collaborative housing projects and policies to support it.
Later in the summer, we approached our research from a different angle and engaged with the question of the legal frameworks whicha can enable commons-oriented housing policies. In early September, researchers from the commoning housing project have also participated in a two-day workshop in Valencia, Spain, titled Códigos Comunes, 11-12 September 2018. The space brought together sociologists, urbanists as well as legal experts to discuss the challenges of imagining and implementing institutional regimes to develop commons-based public resources. Building on critical socio-legal approaches, the workshop raised theoretical as well as practical questions for commons-oriented policies and projects.