CrowdBuilding
In the Netherlands, housing construction is mainly organised top-down, with commercial market parties determining what is built. This results in many homes being built for financial gain rather than optimal living quality and sustainability. These homes are often only suitable for stereotypical households and do not take into account new forms of living.
Space&Matter, an architectural firm involved in many societal projects, set out to counter this. They set out to create a platform to contribute to the housing challenge in the Netherlands in a fair, sustainable, and socially responsible way, while making collective housing accessible to everyone.
Link to website
CrowdBuilding connects motivated home seekers with a shared living ideal, bringing them into contact with construction projects and locations to form a community. Communities collectively imagine their living space, prioritising originality, sustainability, and shared values. By providing concrete, manageable steps and resources to approach municipalities and other parties, CrowdBuilding can guide these communities in the development of their envisioned living dream. This leads to fantastic living spaces, such as floating neighbourhoods, sustainable housing cooperatives, and eco-villages.
I designed and built the initial version of the CrowdBuilding platform using a collection of low-code and tools, relying mostly on Webflow, Airtable, Memberstack and Alphi. Eventually, once the platform had scaled large enough, we moved from the low-code approach and recreated the platform in Next-JS.
