This year marks ten years since the launch of the UK’s first student housing co-ops in Edinburgh and Birmingham.
Since then, students formed housing co-ops in Sheffield in 2015 and Brighton in 2021, housing hundreds of students ovver the years.
The goal of the movement is to see students work together in democratic and mutually supportive ways to build and maintain affordable, safe and sustainable student homes and communities.
To celebrate, apex Student Coop Homes has worked with its members and supporters, and with Anke Schwittay, professor of anthropology and global development at the University of Sussex, to produce an online publication that showcases the movement’s work and creativiity
Schwittay has also recently published the first academic article on student housing co-ops, on an open-access basis in the journal Housing Studies.
The anniversary publication was launched this month at the annual Young Cooperators Network gathering in Liverpool, with more launch events to come throughout the year. Funded by a grant from the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, is available online as a flipbook and a PDF. It was designed by Brandon Fitzgerald, a student at the MA Media Practice for Development and Social Change.
“The existing co-ops show that there is a model that can be scaled,” said Schwittay in an online post, “and there are already other groups of students who have worked hard for many years to obtain their own homes. Financial and institutional support is needed to secure properties for these co-ops and to grow the movement in which they are embedded.”
Schwittay’s academic article, Students Take Over: prefiguring urban commons in student housing co-operatives, looks at the co-ops as ”an example of prefigurative student activism, whereby students are actively creating alternative housing provisions that put them in control of the governance and management of their homes”. It draws on interviews with 27 key participants in the launch of the four co-ops.
Schwittay also made a presentation at a recent symposium on student housing at the Architecture Association in London, which brought together members of several of the existing co-ops in the UK and Canada.
