Cohousing and Ecovillages: Collaborative Solutions to Modern Problems
Can I borrow our hammer?
How many hammers are on your block? Or for that matter, how many circular saws, flathead screwdrivers, sanders, levels, or socket wrench sets? What about blenders, pressure cookers, crock pots, espresso makers, or woks? How many treadmills, stairmasters, exercise bikes, or weight benches? Snow blowers, lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, weed whackers, and wheelbarrows? Here's the point: How often do you use these things?
I'll use the lawn mower example. If you needed to cut the lawn once a week, couldn't you share a lawn mower with six other people? If you all pooled together the money you would spend on a basic walk-behind mower ($200), you and six neighbors could get a nice riding mower ($1,400). And with the time saved on a riding mower, you could do twice the amount of lawns per week; you could do your lawn and your neighbor's lawn in the same time it took you to do your own. So, you could alternate weeks with your neighbor and your money pool would now be doubled. You and 13 neighbors would end up with a beautiful, pivoting industrial-sized mower ($2,800). Wow! Just for sharing. If all 14 decided that the industrial-sized mower was overkill, then getting the riding mower would cut everyone's price in half ($200 x 1/2 = $100 per person). This is just one example of the benefits of a modern village, a cohousing community.
From Denmark with love
Cohousing is a community of individual homes (with all of the usual amenities) laid out in a manner to increase interaction, efficiency, and sustainability; it can be urban, suburban, exurban, or rural. Usually the community has some shared facilities like a common house, courtyards/open spaces, laundry, pool, child care facilities, playgrounds, offices, internet access, game room, TV room, tool room or gym. Whatever the case, everything is planned, owned, and managed by the residents and decisions are made by a consensus. Another hallmark of cohousing is the attempt to keep cars on the outer edge to decrease traffic in the community, increase walking, and maximize safety for children. There are rules of thumb for privacy (front porch = willing to socialize, back porch = private time), people voluntarily spearheading tasks (i.e. gardens, meetings), and the ability to retrofit pre-existing communities or buildings to function as cohousing.
The idea of cohousing originated in Denmark in the late 1960s from two published papers: "Children Should Have One Hundred Parents" by Bodil Graae and "The Missing Link between Utopia and the Dated One-Family House" by Jan Gudmand Høyer. From there it spread across Europe and into North America. Today there are over 150 100 cohousing communities in the U.S. with another 100 in the planning phases.
Don't call it a commune...
While there are some similarities to the communes of the 60s, cohousing leaves out some of the trickier parts of the hippy village. First, there is no shared economy. No one is pooling income, just particular resources like the lawn mower. Second, there is no shared belief system, whether it be political or religious. The only common thread is a sense of community. No matter how you put it, some people just can't separate the two. But they are not the same. There are many different variations on the theme of the intentional community, another being the ecovillage.
With the environment in mind
The main difference between cohousing and an ecovillage is a complete dedication to environmental sustainability on the part of the ecovillage. This includes devotion to a "simpler" lifestyle, limitation of trade outside your area, or complete submission into permaculture. Most people aren't ready to live in such a radical community, but it is good to know that someone is testing it's feasibility. Ecovillages, more so than cohousing communities, borrow from the old commune lifestyle as far as an immersion into a completely different realm of reality. Either way, these new settings provide much-needed alternatives to the urban decay and suburban sprawl that we've become accustomed to. So share the hammer; you may end up with a bad-ass lawn mower.
Thanks for writing about cohousing. As someone involved in the movement for a decade, I appreciate coverage that goes a little deeper than the "it's a modern commune" surface-level coverage... headline-writers love that word, for some reason. Your mowing example nicely covered the benefits of sharing and collective purchase and operation of community amenities, yet you didn't even talk about the storage space saved, the ability to live in smaller homes that use far less energy and cost less because of the shared space, and the likelihood that one person in the community who enjoys lawnmowing will take it on so others who see it as a chore won't have to get involved at all.
I have a couple of minor quibbles with the piece:
1. As the Cohousing Association of the U.S. defines it (see its directory at http://directory.cohousing.org/ ), there are fewer than 100 completed cohousing neighborhoods in the U.S. The FIC lists more (150?) because its directory lets anybody claiming to represent and list a community check a box marked "uses cohousing model" without reference to any definition or after-the-fact checking. If you look for places that actually have a common house built and do at least some meals together, which have private ownership combined with public space, are developed by the residents, and operate by consensus or similar processes, and have independent economies (no income-sharing) or at least a preponderance of those attributes, I think you'll find a more realistic number.
2. The Global EcoVillage Network (GEN) intentionally leaves open the definition of "ecovillage" to encourage more communities to be part of the movement. None of the ones I've visited require "complete submission" into anything, be it permaculture, but many do use a cohousing model for housing development, because it has proved successful, one that banks will finance and cities will approve and which gives members the benefits of private ownership with shared space and activities.
3. We generally leave out the dash: call it "cohousing"!
Raines Cohen, Cohousing Coach
Planning for Sustainable Communities
Berkeley, CA
Currently in Portland, Oregon, visiting a forming EcoVillage that uses a cohousing model, after visiting cohousing neighborhoods in Corvallis (CoHo EcoVillage) and Ashland (Bear Grass Valley). So far I've visited more than 80 completed cohousing neighborhoods and lived in two, one of which I helped develop.
Great article! Ecovillages and Cohousing have definitely a lot to share and learn from each others. If you are interested, we published recently a documentary about cohousings, award winner at 34th Ekotopfilm festival 2007. Trailer and info are available at http://notsocrazy.net
have a good day!