Stockholm has long been facing a housing crisis, and those hit hardest are people who are young and in socioeconomically challenging situations. If you are not affluent, or are exceedingly lucky, finding an apartment is a tough task in itself, and entering the real estate market is a mere pipe dream.

Part of the problem is the ever-rising price of newly produced apartments, which are not only extortionately expensive, but also often lacking in character and, more importantly, comfort. It seems that finding a home has become a trade-off between affordable and comfortable - and that’s if you’re lucky enough to find either in the first place.

So what could the solution to this be? And when striving to achieve affordable housing, what are we willing to sacrifice, and what is essential to a comfortable life? What, in essence, makes a dwelling into a home - and what could we just as well do without?

It is in our human nature to want privacy and a space to call our own. But we are also dependent on social interaction, and forming bonds with eachother.

What is the ideal balance between these two needs?

Many other parts of the world, for example on continental Europe, have solved these problems through co-housing in different forms. We are all familiar with the classic collective, but among the many other forms of varying levels of shared life there is the WG (Wohngemeinschaft - lit. “Living Community”) and the Baugruppe (lit. “Building Group”) concept of the German speaking countries, where the former consists of a classic roommate scenario: several people in a large apartment, but their own individual rooms, where they share the larger spaces (kitchen, living room, bathroom), and the latter is a real estate model where a group of people pool their investment together and actively take part in the process of creating a new building from start to finish.

We, in Sweden, however, have much fewer examples of co-housing solutions.

But could this actually be the key to living comfortably, yet affordably? And how much are we willing to share with our neighbours? How much privacy do we need in our home, and where is the line between comfort through privacy and comfort through generous, pleasant or even luxurious spaces?

These are the questions I have explored in my Thesis Project.