As cities around the world face rising cost of living, rapid urbanization and social fragmentation, Northeastern associate professor of architecture Anthony Averbeck’s new book aims to challenge readers to rethink housing.
Averbeck, who announced the release of “Collective Living and the Architectural Imaginary”at the annual College of Arts, Media and Design Day March 17 explores how housing design and architecture can have a profound impact on culture and community relationships. The book is expected to be published July 1.
“Questions around housing have long structured debates about urban life, but today [housing has] become one of the primary arenas where relationships between private and collective life are negotiated,” Averbeck told the audience of faculty and students.
The architecture professor co-authored the book with Felipe Correa, a founder and managing partner of Somatic Collaborative, and Devin Dobrowolski, an architect for Elliot Architects. It examines 60 housing projects across 16 countries, using architectural drawings to analyze how different models of collective living have evolved over the past century. Rather than focusing on some of the world’s most iconic buildings, Averbeck dubbed housing the “basic building block” of cities.
“The book begins with a simple premise: that housing is not just a technical or quantitative problem, but a spatial and cultural one,” Averbeck said to the audience.
Throughout the March 17 talk, Averbeck explained that collective housing, or housing designed to support shared living and community interaction, extends beyond individual apartments to include shared spaces, infrastructure and urban systems. He argued that this model of housing is increasingly relevant as traditional housing models struggle to meet contemporary needs.
“The erosion of housing affordability, gaps between supply and demand, the fragmentation of domestic life and the intensification of environmental risk have exposed a structural misalignment between contemporary needs and the mechanisms through which housing is designed and delivered,” Averbeck said to the audience.
For students in attendance, the discussion offered a new perspective on how architecture can address global challenges — particularly in rapidly growing cities where density and access to housing persist.
Katherine Reeves, a rising second-year architecture major who attended the talk, said the examples Averbeck presented shifted her understanding of housing.
“It made me think about housing as something more than just individual units,” Reeves said. “It’s really about how people interact, share space and build community.”
The book draws on case studies from around the world. The collective housing strategies it highlights are particularly relevant to regions experiencing rapid urban growth, such as Southeast Asia, where cities like Jakarta, Indonesia and Manila, Philippines face growing challenges around housing affordability.
Averbeck noted that while housing conditions vary globally, the principles of collective living can apply across different cultural and urban contexts.
“Ideas of collectivity are sort of universal,” he said. “There are universal human needs to socialize and live together in various ways.”
His talk emphasized the need for housing that can evolve over time as patterns of daily life continue to change, emphasizing that community-based housing projects featured in the book “show the need for housing to remain adaptable, continually rethinking our assumptions in response to changing social norms, environmental pressures and evolving patterns of work, care and coexistence.”
Dan Adams, director and professor of Northeastern’s School of Architecture, echoed the urgency of the subject.
“It would be hard to identify a topic in urban design and architecture that’s more pressing from a societal perspective than housing,” Adams said to the audience.
Averbeck asserted that the central theme of his architecture is not just about addressing challenges, but imagining new possibilities.
“In each case, architects are not simply resolving a problem,” he said. “They’re projecting ways of how we can live together.”
