Re: Cohousing Altnernative
From: Collaborative Housing Society (cohosocweb.apc.org)
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 1995 00:37 EDT
We switched the name of our organization from CoHousing Society to
Collaborative Housing Society a few years back (thanks to Dorit Fromm's
book) because we wanted to strengthen the focus on the process rather than
the product, which cohousing has already started to become.

It has worked, to a certain degree.  Collaboration is fast becoming the
buzzword of the late nineties (witness IBM's TV ads, and most writing in
professional journals of any stripe), losing its connotation of "working
with the enemy".  We wondered also if the "co" prefix causes trouble, partly
because of the strong negative connotation co-op housing got around here as
a form of social (low-income) housing.

But in the end, it seems to be "housing" that creates the biggest mental
hurdles.  I wonder if the reaction Steve Farley presumed from his townfolk
would be because of the seemingly immediate connection of "housing" with
"project", not so much because of any tie-in to the social/low-income stuff,
but because "housing" suggests an engineered, prescriptive, "designed" place
to live, which is perhaps part of what some approaches to cohousing border
upon, at least to the casual observer.  It also tends to draw attention to
the buildings themselves (yet another legacy of Modernism?) rather than the
people, places and spaces between the buildings.  Steve's community just
_is_, and I would venture to guess that the buildings in which it happens
are just taken for granted, part of the background.

It seems that whenever we start designing houses and planning community is
about the time we start to lose it (culturally speaking). . .

I know this isn't anything close to a solution, but hopefully helps get at
the problem a bit more.  Anyway, what I really want to call this stuff is
"my neighbourhood". . .

Other (REJECTED) alternatives:

Planned Community, Resident Participatory Development, Intentional
Neighbourhood

Russell Mawby
CoHoSoc (get it?) - Toronto



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