Cohousing-L Mailing List: Cohousing - must it be resident built?

[Jerry Callen (jcallen]

   From: stuarts [at] landau.ucdavis.edu (Stuart Staniford-Chen)

   The important thing about cohousing is not a certain way to
   arrange buildings, but a way to arrange people -- in a community.  If 
   professional marketers pick it up, they will be selling an image, a mirage.
   The real thing can only be built by the people involved.

This is certainly the accepted cohousing wisdom, but I wonder if it is
true. After all, at least a part of what cohousing is attempting to do is
RECAPTURE the sense of neighborhood that seems to have been lost in much of
suburban living. No one planned the neighborhood that I grew up in, yet it
fostered a surprising (in retrospect) level of community.

I suspect that full-blown cohousing, with community meals and the whole
nine yards, may need to be built by the residents in order to work. But I
also suspect that the architectural features of cohousing could be used by a
developer to produce a collection of dwelling units that could, eventually,
evolve into a fairly tight-knit community.

-- Jerry Callen
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