Co-housing response to social isolation of covid-19 outbreak, with a focus on gender implications

© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.COVID-19 forced billions of people to restructure their daily lives and social habits. Sev-eral research projects have focused on social impacts, approaching the phenomenon on the basis of different issues and scales. This work studies the changes in social relations within the well-defined urban-territorial elements of co-housing communities. The peculiarity of this research lies in the essence of these communities, which base their existence on the spirit of sharing spaces and activi-ties. As social distancing represented the only effective way to control the outbreak, the research studied how the rules of social distancing impacted these communities. For this reason, a questionnaire was sent to 60 communities asking them to highlight the changes that the emergency imposed on the members in their daily life and in the organization of common activities and spaces. A total of 147 responses were received and some relevant design considerations emerged: (1) the importance of feeling part of a ¿safe¿ community, with members who were known and deemed relia-ble, when facing a health emergency; and (2) the importance of open spaces to carry out shared activities. Overall, living in co-housing communities was evaluated as an ¿extremely positive cir-cumstance¿ despite the fact that the emergency worsened socialization.

Co-housing response to social isolation of covid-19 outbreak, with a focus on gender implications Academic Article in Scopus