Bridging the gap: Professional perspectives on cohousing and the institutions of housing production in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research investigates how cohousing is understood, framed, and operationalized by professionals working in Canada’s planning, housing, and development sectors. While the cohousing model is increasingly recognized for its potential to address affordability, social isolation, and environmental sustainability, it remains marginal within Canadian housing systems. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with planners, developers, architects, and consultants, this study examines the institutional barriers, interpretive practices, and professional strategies that shape the implementation of cohousing. The findings highlight a core tension: although cohousing often aligns with official policy goals, such as densification, affordability, and inclusion, it does not fit easily within prevailing regulatory and financial structures. The research emphasizes the interpretive and procedural work done by professionals to navigate this misalignment, revealing the extent to which cohousing depends on informal adaptations and individual persistence. While the study does not attempt to provide a policy blueprint, it identifies key leverage points for institutional reform, including zoning, access to credit, and the professionalization of support infrastructure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.050 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".