Participation in Sustainable Housing: A case study of participation in a Swedish housing cooperative’s sustainability efforts

Sustainable development is now a part of environmental, social, and economic agendas all over the world. Sustainability projects are cropping up in urban areas, including projects in the housing sector aimed at sustainable regeneration. Simultaneously, it is now recognized that public participation is an essential character of implementing change. And within sustainability participation, it is considered important that participants can influence decisions and are engaged in some form of social learning. Participation theory, though, is still struggling with solidifying understanding of the multitudinous forms of participation and how participation techniques function in practice. Nor is it clear what the opportunities and barriers of participation are when participatory processes are supposedly applied to sustainable housing projects. This research examines sustainability and participation theory; and then it analyzes the case of Hållbara Hilda in Rosengård, one of the Million Homes Program areas of Malmö, Sweden, in order to describe the experiences and determine how participation in these sustainability projects can be effective at involving participants in both decision making and social learning, two factors leading towards social sustainability. The methods include literature analysis, review of official documents and online communications, both semi-structured and informal interviews, and reference to best practice cases. The findings include that several improvements can be made to the participation techniques at Hållbara Hilda, and that there are both available opportunities and impeding barriers. Overall, participation would be more effective towards sustainability and more likely to take advantage of opportunities and reduce barriers if it were designed to be more inclusive, deliberative, and decentralized; and if housing associations and funding agencies align their objectives