Measuring planning cultures for co-housing development

We define co-housing development as the self-provided development of a new housing supply through the cooperation between individuals. Co-housing development provides interesting solutions to many of the current problems of housing production and this phenomenon is therefore increasing all over Europe since the 2000s. We also see this trend in French-speaking Belgium (Wallonia and Brussels), although the evolution there remains limited.
Many general obstacles are pointed out in both, the academic research and outreach handbook, to explain the limited development of co-housing development: land acquisition, planning permission, time investment... Besides those general reasons, we consider that the culture can also be a major barrier, specially in environments such as French-speaking Belgium where the trust level among the population is weak, as showed by the European Social Survey.
In order to test this hypothesis, we aim to measure culture by using experimental economics. Experimental economics are experiments motivated by economics questions. Those experiments are notably used to measure the impact of culture on beliefs and preferences as well as on economic outcomes. With this method inspired by studies in economics, we build a link between planning culture and planning outcome through attitudes.
Our work is based on experiments measuring two attitudes that are critical for co-housing development: trust and cooperation. We conduct those experiments with students in several European countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, France and England. The objective of those experiments is to check that the propensity for co-operation is lower in French- speaking Belgium than in other countries.