Co-creation for transformation: Turnaround Money for nature-positive and affordable housing

Climate change and socio-economic inequities pose major challenges to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly in the housing sector. Despite an urgent need for sustainable and affordable housing, traditional financial systems often hinder progress by prioritizing speculative activities and fossil-fuel lock-in over societal and ecological value creation. This research addresses this gap by investigating how a collective, bottom-up strategy can support a positive finance transformation in the affordable housing sector, enabling a future that is community-oriented, nature-positive, and climate-resilient. The study builds on the European project “Turnaround Money”. The Belgian case explored how actors involved in transformative shifts within housing and finance can co-create strategies to integrate innovative niche practices into mainstream systems. The research tailors the MISC (Mapping Innovations on the Sustainability Curve) methodological framework by specifying its distinctive steps compared to other co-creation models and by analyzing its outputs. The main contribution lies in a systematic way of designing co-creation trajectories that align affordable housing renovations with alternative conceptions of finance. The application of this framework enabled the co-creation of a systems map and the identification of strategic levers for advancing sustainable finance in the housing sector. The visualization of these direct results turned out to be valuable instruments for understanding and addressing systems complexities. Finally, the research highlighted that collaborative solutions inherently involve uncertain outcomes, as co-creation is an emergent and non-linear process. This challenges conventional planning models and underscores the need for adaptive approaches that remain open to unforeseen results.