A pattern language for urban commons: case studies of cohousing residents’ involvement in shared residential landscapes.

This research aims to create a pattern language for urban commons to understand how communities design and manage shared residential landscapes. Shared outdoor spaces have various benefits that support community building and sustainable placemaking. However, shared landscapes have previously been overlooked or unsuccessfully implemented in UK urban housing developments. A new urban commons movement underpinning bottom-up approaches to managing shared resources in cities provides a way of rethinking how residential landscapes are delivered. Despite its growing use in urban design discourse, there remains a gap in understanding how to implement urban commons in practice. Cohousing, an alternative community-led housing model with a high level of resident
involvement in the design, delivery and management of shared landscapes, provides a real-world example of how such spaces can operate as urban commons. Through the lens of assemblage theory, this study combines pattern languages with grounded and participatory approaches to develop a methodology for studying complex urban places. Qualitative data is collected using this grounded pattern approach to study resident participation in shared landscapes across four cohousing cases in UK cities. The thesis presents 72 solutions for urban commoning identified in cohousing landscapes as a pattern language card, alongside detailed
empirical accounts of four urban cohousing communities. The results reveal five tensions negotiated by cohousing residents and five concepts for dealing with these tensions by combining the empirical case study findings with wider urban commons discourse. Together, these findings reframe urban commons as complex and dynamic assemblages utilising ‘middle-ground’ strategies to negotiate multiple conflicting states. The outputs of this research provide a practical tool for residents and design practitioners to get involved in shared residential landscapes, a grounded pattern methodology for researchers studying complex urban environments, and concepts that build upon urban commons theory.