Housing cooperatives, housing systems and the state. Historical lessons from Europe, Australia and Latin-America

This special issue addresses the relationship between the historical development of cooperative housing and broader housing systems in different national, regional and local contexts. Several studies suggest that housing cooperatives, meaning rented orowner-occupied housing managed and owned by residents, have both influenced and been shaped by wider housing system dynamics. ‘Housing systems’ (often used interchangeably with ‘housing regimes’) may be defined broadly as the actors, norms, rules, laws and policies governing the planning, financing, production, exchange, and distribution of housing within a state, region, or city (see for instance: Hoekstra, 2020; Ruonavaara, 2020). However, the historically oriented cooperative housing literature does not include many references to the debate on the develop-ment of housing systems and consists mainly of case studies fromcountries with a rich and long-standing tradition of cooperative housing, such as Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany (see for instance: Balmer & Gerber, 2018; Lang & Stoeger, 2018; Sørvoll & Bengtsson, 2018; 2020a).