Senior Women’s Cohousing in the UK: Living Together in Later Life
Since 2015, I have explored how collaborative living reshapes ageing, care, and wellbeing for senior women by focusing on the UK’s first senior and women’s only cohousing group. This has led to methodological and theoretical interventions at the interface of critical urban geography; feminist geographies of ageing, health and housing; environmental gerontology and psychosocial transitions in later life. Its participatory and mixed methods approach laid empirical groundwork for subsequent projects that delved deeper into the ageing, social care and health dimensions of living in collaborative housing, including aspects of COVID 19.
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Loneliness and Community Led Housing (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government)
Embedding Participative Methods in Longitudinal Research on Senior Co housing (Averil Osborn Award for Participatory Research Fund)
The Impact of Co-Housing on Health and Well-being: A Case Study of the Older Women’s Cohousing Group (Tudor Trust)
Well-being and age in co-housing life: thinking with and beyond design (LU Centre for Ageing Research Seminar Series)
Developing research on The Impact of Co-Housing on Health and Well-being: A Case Study of the Older Women’s Cohousing Group (LU FFASS Research Fund)
REPORT for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities: ‘Those little connections’: Community-led housing and loneliness’. With Kath Scanlon, Jim Hudson, Mara Ferreri and Karen West, with Chihiro Udagawa. 2023.
JOURNAL ARTICLE: Fernández Arrigoitia, M., Ferreri, M., Hudson, J, Scanlon, K., West, K. (2023) "Toward a feminist housing commons? Conceptualising care - (as) - work in collaborative housing’, Housing, Theory and Society, 40:5, 660-678.
JOURNAL ARTICLE: Izuhara, M., Hudson, J., Fernández Arrigoitia, M & West, K. (2022) ‘Collaborative Housing Communities through the COVID-19 Pandemic: Rethinking governance & mutuality’. Housing Studies, 38(1): 65-83.
JOURNAL ARTICLE: Fernandez Arrigoitia, M. and West, K. (2021) Interdependence, commitment, learning and love: the case of the United Kingdom’s first older women’s co-housing community. Ageing and Society, 41(7): 1673-1696.
JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUE: Arrigoitia, M. F., West, K., & Peace, S. (2018). Towards Critical Intersections of Ageing, Housing and Well-Being. Home Cultures, 15 (3), 209–221.
JOURNAL ARTICLE: Hudson, J., Scanlon, K., Udagawa, C., Arrigoitia, M. F., Ferreri, M., & West, K. (2021) ‘A Slow Build-Up of a History of Kindness’: Exploring the Potential of Community-Led Housing in Alleviating Loneliness. Sustainability, 13(20), 113-23.
BLOG: ‘Collaborative housing futures: paradoxes and possibilities in crisis’ Eco-communities in an urban future. Naturebuild, ESRC Blog. 2020.
BLOG: What collaborative housing offers in a pandemic: Evidence from 18 communities in England and Wales. Housing LIN Viewpoint 104. With Hudson, J., Ferreri, M., Izuhara, M., Scanlon, K. and West, K. February, 2021.
STUDY DAY & BLOG: ‘Well-being and age in co-housing life: Thinking with and beyond design’ (with West, K. and Scanlon, K.) January 2018.