The properties of self-managed collective housing: Kinning and Inheritance

This article explores the relationship between property, law and everyday life in two self-managed collective housing sites in England, a housing co-operative and a co-housing development. In each of these sites the residents are bound together by a property law framework, by their built environment and by the spaces they share and manage. The residents are developing alternative legalities, their own informal norms and non-legally enforceable rules, which are transmitted to new residents in a form of inheritance. This article offers a new perspective on sharing property and belonging to a collective, within a housing culture based on individual ownership. The argument that the concepts of kinning and inheritance can be ‘stretched’ to take account of the intangible ‘properties’ generated by intentional communities’ residents, contributes to both socio-legal studies and legal anthropology.