Earlier this month, Mellis Haward, Director at Archio, had the opportunity to speak at the 2024 UK Cohousing Summit.

At Archio we are focused on creating a better quality of life for all. We collaborate with local authorities, cohousing groups, community land trusts, and work on large-scale housing strategies and retrofits. Some of our notable projects include Citizen House with London CLT, Angel Yard intergenerational cohousing in Norwich, and Phoenix Lewes hybrid cohousing with Human Nature.

Our approach centres on working closely with communities. As Mellis put it during her presentation, this requires architects to “leave their ego at the door” and prioritise collaboration with future residents. In codesign and cohousing, architects help navigate pros, cons, and complexities to reach consensus on key decisions, such as common house placement, privacy levels, and sustainability goals.

Archio has also produced two significant guides to support this work.

1. We have worked with GLA on a guide to commissioning codesign.

2. We have also produced the codesign toolkit, where they share what are the principles of codesign and how they relate to cohousing.

Some key principles mentioned

- Setting a clear process: Giving people agency to get involved, e.g., through a flowchart that outlines the process step by step.
- Giving others the pen: Using experience mapping to understand their perspectives, e.g., block modelling.
- Enabling representative and constructive conversations: Building diverse networks.
- Facilitating decision-making: Using exercises like temperature checks or traffic light systems (like, dislike, maybe) or cost prioritisation workshops.
- Empowering communities long-term: Sharing knowledge through templates.

Working with Phoenix Cohousing on a potential site (Lewes case study), Mellis faced the question of how a community can manifest what they want if there is not yet a cohousing community. Therefore, they created a festival workshop to create interest and appetite for sharing living, and to have clear principles of shared living.

Ongoing codesign, the architects/designer role continues after the community has moved in (though obviously it’s challenging capacity-wise). This can help understand:

- What has and hasn’t worked?
- What have they changed?

Something to be very clear is that public engagement is not the same codesign.

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