Re: Cohousing Altnernative | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
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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