Cooperative Housing Solutions: Experiences of Collaborative Housing Production in Latin America.

There is a relative consensus that self-construction is the primary means of accessing housing for low-income social groups in Latin America. Many of these self-construction processes were carried out individually, spontaneously and autonomously, without assistance from governmental units or other public or private actors. This led to the quality of the housing solutions being constrained by the resource scarcity of these populations.

However, there are also numerous cases of collective processes in which social groups with housing needs managed to deploy organizational and constructive practices to produce their own habitat, achieving more favorable results than individual and autonomous experiences. Among these cases, most were organized under the legal form of housing cooperatives, which operated in collaboration with various public institutions (government agencies or research teams from publics universities).

In this sense, this work aims to answer the following questions: What problems do these cooperative experiences manage to solve and what problems do they not? What learnings and organizational technologies did these experiences generate solving these problems? What limits did they encounter in the construction of material solutions? To answer these research questions, this work will analyze the cases of the Federación Uruguaya de Cooperativas por Ayuda Mutua (FUCVAM), União Nacional por Moradia Popular (UNMP) from Brazil, and the Movimiento de Ocupantes e Inquilinos (MOI) from Argentina. These are second-order organizations, meaning they bring together a heterogeneous set of cooperatives related to habitat and housing.

As a first approach to the conclusions of the work, these cooperative experiences managed to generate housing solutions appropriate to the needs and expectations of their users. This was possible because the coordination and knowledge sharing of these organizations with government units, R&D teams and other social organizations. However, the limits of these processes are found in the dependence on state financing to build housing.