Building Preparedness: Multi-Family Housing and Collective Resilience in an Era of Polycrisis

Övrigt konferensbidrag, 2026

Contemporary societies are increasingly confronted with overlapping crises affecting everyday life and infrastructures and housing conditions. While preparedness strategies often focus on institutional responses and individual responsibilities, less attention has been paid to how housing environments shape possibilities for adaptation and mutual support during disruptions. This exploratory paper examines how preparedness may emerge in multi-family housing through the interaction between spatial configurations, infrastructures, and everyday resident practices. Drawing on socio-material and practice-oriented perspectives, the study is based on five qualitative interviews conducted with residents living in apartment buildings in Sweden. Using apartment layouts and building floor plans, participants reflected on situations involving interruptions to electricity or water supply during summer and winter conditions. The findings highlight the importance of dual aspect apartments, thermal differentiation between rooms, spatial redundancy, and everyday adaptive practices in supporting crisis adaptation. The paper also points toward tensions between domestic autonomy, infrastructural dependence, and collective resilience in contemporary housing environments.