Coping Strategies of the Inhabitants of Collaborative and Regular Housing Arrangements during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Emerging Conceptual Re-elaboration of the Underlying Mechanisms through an Integrative Literature Review

Abstract

This review revisits the literature on collaborative and regular housing focusing on the intersection of housing affordability, social integration and health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Collaborative housing is an umbrella term that generates space not only for socio-spatial alternatives but also for alternative economic and legal frameworks in the context of housing. Hence, collaborative housing broadens the scope of regular housing by enabling the appropriation of common spaces by the inhabitants, encouraging social interaction, promoting sharing practices, self-organisation and collective solidarity in everyday life. Little is known about the challenges, experiences and mechanisms underlying the coping ways by which inhabitants dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic. Through an integrative literature review methodology, this study explores (1) How was unwanted isolation experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic?, (2) How did residents cope with the pandemic?, and (3) Which spatial solutions contributed to their well-being? This review includes 50 peer-reviewed articles, ten reports and 12 grey literature publications in three linguistic areas of English, German, and French in the timeframe of 2020–2022. Enriching the COVID-19 research in the context of housing, the review contributes to the synthesis of a state-of-the-art knowledge space by representing an emerged conceptual re-elaboration of coping responses in the context of regular and collaborative housing settings. Thus, the essence of this integrative review approach catalysed the unearthing of the underlying mechanisms of coping strategies and their causal explanations. Insights from various perspectives are extracted and organised to make them accessible to all while the elaboration for future research is identified.