Collaborative housing as a socio-spatial system from a critical realism perspective. Can unintended consequences be understood as causal mechanisms?

Holism, abduction and causality are ways of reasoning that can complement each other to enable better understanding of contemporary wicked problems. Current social challenges include a global housing crisis, unwanted isolation and polarized societies. Systems thinking is instrumental to zoom out a specific phenomenon in an attempt to capture the complexity of reality. It also provides a holistic view of the purpose and interconnections of the elements within a system. The concept of unintended consequences is relevant to understand how certain elements within the system affect each other. Adopting Critical Realism as a metatheory, explicitly the theory and philosophy underlying systems thinking, implies a view of the world as structured, differentiated, stratified and changing. Hence, unintended consequences can be understood as causal mechanisms triggered by social structures within the domain of the real.
Critical realists are interested in the (ir)regularities produced within a system as well as in causality of both agents and structures. One irregularity within the Swedish housing system is collaborative housing that is an alternative housing form to market driven housing provision. Collaborative Housing has been conceptualized as a socio-spatial system with ongoing practices of collaboration, trust, influence, mutual support and sharing in everyday life, which have been redefined and reinforced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper attempts to discuss collaborative housing as a socio-spatial system having critical realism as a metatheory. What kinds of causality are envisaged under realist complexity in relation to collaborative housing? Collaborative housing is affordable, enables social interaction and social integration. However, access to this form of housing is sometimes limited to residents who have saving capacity with the unintended consequence of excluding low-income households. The paper sheds light on how critical realist scholars analytically treat complexity and argues that critical realism enables digging deeper at the ontological level of socio-spatial systems.