Beyond Research: The Deliberative Forum as Ecosocial Practice for a Post-Growth Housing Commons
Katarzyna Wodniak, Waleed Serhan
This article presents a deliberative forum on cooperative housing in Dublin as transformative ecosocial practice. Adapted from Fishkin’s (2009) Deliberative Polling, the forum operationalised Folgheraiter and Raineri’s (2023) relational social work by scaffolding the trust, conflict navigation, and knowledge co-production essential to commoning (Ostrom, 1990). Participants, predominantly young adults locked out of traditional markets, framed cooperative housing as a holistic vehicle integrating environmental justice with community repair, where social cohesion enables sustainability through shared resources and collective design, directly challenging narratives of individual ownership. The study suggests that such deliberative interventions expand the «institutional imagination» required to materialise housing as an urban commons, concluding that post-growth policy must prioritise enabling ecologies for polycentric co-production. The forum thus emerges as a scalable prototype for ecosocial work in times of intersecting crises.
Keywords
Cooperative housing, Deliberative democracy, Relational social work, Ecosocial practice, Institutional imagination.
