Social sustainability, as a main pillar of sustainable urban development, is essential for enhancing citizens’ quality of life and shaping livable communities. Yet in the design of collective housing, this concept is still approached in a scattered and interdisciplinary way, lacking conceptual and theoretical coherence. The research addresses the absence of a unified framework explaining how human relations, belonging, and spatial justice interconnect in dense residential environments where the lived experience of social coexistence is often neglected. The purpose is to identify and analyze the conceptual and theoretical patterns of social sustainability in collective housing and to explore its global links with quality of life and human interaction. The research applies a scientometric method using data from the Web of Science database, analyzing co-authorship, co-semantic, co-reference, and co-citation networks between 1990 and 2025 through VOSviewer software. The findings reveal that global knowledge on social sustainability in collective housing remains theoretically immature, as its production networks are sparse and insular. Still, four interrelated semantic clusters have emerged within the literature, associated with social policy and participation, spatial quality and urban design, smart technology, and social resilience. The overall scientific discourse shows a gradual trend toward integrating social sustainability with indicators of livability, well-being, and residential satisfaction. The study concludes that achieving social sustainability in collective housing design requires a shift from physical approaches toward a relational understanding of people and space, where architectural design becomes a medium for interaction, spatial justice, and cultural coexistence. Emphasizing the interdependence of social, cultural, and spatial dimensions, this research provides a foundation for strengthening theoretical frameworks and developing human-centered design patterns that shape the future of sustainable and inclusive urban housing.