Enhancing Sharing Capabilities Housing and Neighborhood Planning Opportunities for Improving Health

ABSTRACT

The global COVID-19 pandemic has led households to find creative ways to share resources to address isolation, stress, and anxiety. We build on these social experiments to suggest that sharing in housing and neighborhoods can lead to better mental health and wellbeing. The capabilities approach, popularized by philosophers Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, provides a theoretical perspective for integrating sharing options into housing and neighborhood design, regulation, and investment. We offer a framework delineating dimensions of sharing that has the potential to encourage more sharing and shift planning emphasis from housing as an outcome to one that promotes sharing.