Novel design principles and process models for emerging CSO housing market

After many years of top down organised urban planning and housing provision, the current time frame identifies a reverse trend: a collective bottom-up approach. In this approach, the initiative and directing power comes from individuals and group of individuals now, instead of local municipalities or large real estate developers that have dominated the housing scene for long. Particularly the group of individuals play a key potential role to build energy efficient housing at district scale. We call this collective and energy-efficient approach, Collective Self-Organized (CSO) Housing. In CSO housing, individuals form and organize a collective client-ship and steer their housing process towards their values, wishes, and prerequisites. They take liberty to formulate where and how to live, contact the market suppliers, engage themselves in design process, and move towards their particular social, economic, environmental and spatial ambitions (i.e. sustainability, eco-design, energy efficiency, child friendly etc.). Depending on the profile of the collectives, these ambitions include changing degree of active participation of the individuals to the design process. However, embedding this participation to the conventional design process and being a collective client pursuing particular ambitions requires a different arrangement with market parties (designers, engineers, advisors etc.) and municipalities than the traditional stakeholder relations.