Who holds the building? Organisational, institutional and spatial conditions for a student housing co-operative in Ghent

Ghent houses close to 90,000 students, roughly 47% of whom rent a room. Average room rents rose by 36% between 2020 and 2025, the shortage runs into five figures, and sustained construction has had no measurable effect on affordability. The housing co-operative is sometimes proposed as an answer. This thesis asks under which organisational, institutional and spatial conditions one could be established in Ghent.

It combines a comparative reading of three organisations carrying that label, in Geneva, Birmingham and Utrecht, with five interviews conducted and four workshops with municipal and university actors. Property documents, planning regulations, two financial models and QGIS mapping support an assessment of three institutional scenarios attached to specific sites, against six criteria derived from the analysis.

The central finding concerns time. Cost rent and commissioning competence accumulate over decades, through property held, surplus retained and expertise carried between projects, and a membership renewing every three or four years accumulates none of these. Only the spatial advantage, in which private floor area is exchanged for shared space, completes within one tenancy. In none of the three cases did residents supply the development or acquisition capital. A permanent external holder is therefore a structural condition of the model and not an optional feature, and the working definition is amended so that its elements may be split between a resident body and an organisation outlasting it.

Ghent students can organise and have not governed housing. Everyday self-management already operates in university residences, as a transfer of unpaid labour and not an extension of control, and the obstacles to governance concern capacity, not willingness. No single institution holds the full set of capacities. The financing mix moves rent further than scale does, entry contributions select residents by family means, and only a condition attached to the land could direct the housing towards the least secure students. Collective space varies with how the land arrives, favouring reuse and building above existing structures.

The thesis proposes a double governance arrangement, narrowed under test to three reserved resident competences. None of these conditions currently obtains, and establishing them is a political undertaking before it is a housing one.