The Role of Neighbourly Relations and Cooperation in Residents’ Willingness to Renovate Multi-Family Buildings in Croatia

Anamaria Klasić and Ratko Đokić, PhD are the authors of the paper “The Role of Neighbourly Relations and Cooperation in Residents’ Willingness to Renovate Multi-Family Buildings in Croatia“. The paper was published in the journal “Critical Housing Analysis“. The journal is indexed in Q1 in the Scopus data base for Sociology and Political Science (2022).

The authors suggest in the abstract that inadequate legislation on multi-family housing management in Central and Eastern European post-socialist countries calls for the exploration of additional determinants of building renovation at the level of the community of residents in a building. To this end, an analytical framework is proposed, called the mediated-Renovation Decision (m-RD) model for simultaneously testing the direct and indirect effects that neighbourly relations, cooperation of the co-owners’ representative with the co-owners, and acceptance of the building co-ownership concept have on co-owners’ willingness to invest in building renovation. The model is based on assessments made by 325 co-owners’ representatives from multi-family buildings in Croatia. The results show that the quality of neighbourly relations affects the co-owner’s willingness to renovate not directly, but indirectly through the level of their acceptance of the building co-ownership concept. The other indirect effect of neighbourly relations – through the level of the representative’s cooperation with co-owners – was not significant. The demonstrated analytical value of the m-RD model advocates for more complex studies of the role of neighbourly relations in collective decision-making and actions in the housing domain.

The paper is written within the CSF project “Quality of living in the Housing Estates of the socialist and post-socialist era: a comparative analysis between Slovenia and Croatia“ (HESC). The project principal investigator is Anđelina Svirčić Gotovac, PhD.

The paper is available at the link.