Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Cyberspace vs. real community

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

Susan Murphy, Cantine s Island CoHousing wrote:

> CoHousing is SO HARD TO DO!  Why would anybody in
>their right mind ever consign themselves to such a long, hard, risky
>effort, which has as its payoff the opportunity to spend the rest of your
>life negotiating every damn thing with too many people, on trust that they
>really mean it about respecting your privacy and autonomy (yeah, right!)?
>By definition, Peter and I must not be in our right minds, because we ve
>hung in here for over 4 years now.  But I m starting to envy the people
>whose  community  is literally right at their fingertips, and suspect that
>many of our best candidates are already too enmeshed netwise to even
>consider going to the effort of building an actual community.

I agree with Susan's first line, but I would change it to: developing a 
custom designed neighborhood is so hard to do.  However, building 
community is not so hard to do.  You do not have to have a custom 
designed, built from scratch neighborhood to have a community.  N-St.. 
in Davis  is one example of another, gentler, more sane path.  I have 
friends that are creating community among themselves without trying to 
do any construction projects at all.  They are buying a pre-existing 
structure that was used by a curling club as a commonhouse.  It is 
about a mile away from most of their houses, 2 miles from the furthest 
house.  They all live in existing suburbia and have been doing dinner 
club for two years.  Dinner club, and their community  finally outgrew 
their houses and soon will own this small meeting hall where there is a 
community kitchen (very low scale but perfectly suitable) and enough 
space for parties and meetings.  They do things together, share 
resources, hang out, swap kid care, etc.  They just don't all live in 
the same block, nor have to.

Another group of folks I know of, called the Goodenough community, have 
a much higher intensity of commitment and relationship to each other 
and again, share one group house for office and meeting space and all 
live in various places around the city of Seattle and beyond.  They 
have a "non-residential" intentional community.

About a year ago I did a presentation about communities in the small 
town of Duvall, near Sharingwood and I encouraged the folks that came 
to exchange phone numbers
and take some action towards their dreams of community.  I heard that 
25 of them have been getting together regularly for potlucks and doing 
all sorts of resource and personal sharing together.  I know of another 
group doing the same thing in Seattle.

I talked with a single mother, who felt isolated and alone after the 
divorce of her husband and so she started doing block parties where she 
lived.  At first only a couple people came, but by the third one, they 
had become monthly and 70% of her neighbors on her block were showing 
up.  Now she is the center of a large hub of people and activities, 
organizing sharing of tools, a monthly potluck, study groups, and 
coolest of all, the fence removal brigade, a bunch of people who are 
negotiating new boundaries by removing their fences.  She knows all her 
neighbors, the kids all know her and come play and help in the garden, 
and she feels very much in community in a standard suburban neighborhood.

For further inspiration about how to create community where you live, 
instead of becoming real estate developers, I highly recommend reading:
*Creating Community Anywhere: Finding support and Connection in a 
fragmented world  by Caroline Shaffer and Kristin Anundsen.
*Community Dreams, by Alan Berkowitz.

You DO NOT have to develop real estate to have community.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood.