It is ‘more than just about building houses’: collaborating towards a housing commons in Leeds

While current research focuses on the emergence of community-led housing (CLH) in England and individual cases, including co-operatives and Community Land Trusts, understanding of the breadth of CLH and its contribution to a city-wide commons is limited. We explore the evolution of CLH-as-commoning in the city of Leeds through three time periods and a framework of ‘differential’ and ‘transitional’ commoning, attentive to relations, spatiality and governance, and multiple contested visions from minimalist to maximalist. There was a maximalist tendency in the 1970s/80s, minimalist into the 1990s, and maximalist-pragmatist in the 2000s/10s. More significantly, we highlight the important role that minimalist and pragmatist tendencies play in the ongoing growth of the commons and commoners. CLH is part of a growing urban commons if we see it built through a patchwork of different approaches and actors, all contributing to cumulative horizon building. The transformative potential of CLH-as-commoning lies in repeated attempts to challenge the current housing system. More needs to be done to support long term collaboration between civil society and the state to widen involvement, expand provision and support democratic benefits of CLH.