Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Lot Development Model

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

>I was a bit surprised to see you stressing social community design.  I got
>the impression from some of your previous postings that design wasn't that
>big of an issue for a community.  You seemed to stress deliberate interaction
>and communication.  Would you mind elaborating on this?

In my experience, design of the site has little effect on the real 
"community".  I have come to believe that the definition of community 
is the relationships people have with each other and their commitment 
to that relationship.  Site design has nothing to do with this. 
Relationships are built in a way that is completely separate and not 
affected by site design in any way other than having the ability to get 
together in some  sort of place, be it a barn, a commonhouse, a 
basement.  I would say that if you are designing a community from 
scratch, then paying attention to ways to make it easy for people to 
look out of their private indoor space and see outdoor activity is a 
good idea.  Designing outdoor activity spaces which can be easily seen 
by lots of houses is a good idea.  None of these design ideas will 
build anything other than superficial contact relationships with 
people, and this superficial contact  is not "community".  I have been 
to places which are very good "social designs" where the people who 
live there do not have "community" ,the level of their relationships 
are not what the people had hoped for and wanted.  I have been to 
communities that have extremely poor social design, but which have 
intense "community".  Community is sort of like love, you understand 
when you are in it, but it is hard to try to explain or to quantify.  
What I rail against constantly with architects is the notion that a 
social design builds "community".  I have seen no evidence of this and 
my experience tells me that the two are unrelated.  Bumping into 
someone and having a chat is more community building than not bumping 
into them, but only  at a  superficial level.  Its sort of like the 
difference between your relationship with your lover and the people at 
work.  You can have all kinds of social interactions with the people 
you work with, but you may not really care about the rest of their 
lives, nor would you be willing to make the sacrifices and commitments 
that you would for a lover.

Some other questions based on your posting . . . .
What about the design hasn't worked out?

Until last year, there was really no outside gathering place for the 
community.  It is very hard for some of the people in some of the 
houses to know when a gathering is happening, we have to go tell them 
or call them up, they can not see nor hear the gathering place from 
their home.  Until just last fall, there was no place to sit down 
outside in the commons.  My wife and I built a garden patio in our 
front yard, people experienced this, and then we built several benches 
and spread them around the gathering places.

Why don't some of the early houses interact with the community?  Is site
design the key factor or is it something else?

 I was speaking of the houses, not the occupants of the houses. The two 
houses which were built first have lots of glass and windows to the 
back yard and woods and no windows or view into the community.  They 
are entirely faced the wrong way to see what is happening on the road 
and gathering places.  When you walk up to them, you have no idea even 
if anyone is home.  They are closed off.  Later homes, have significant 
windows that you can see into and see some activity and of course the 
occupants can see outside as well.  The complete lack of any 
inside/outside interaction really affects these houses.

Is one of the problems too big of suburban type houses, as you alluded to in
the Communities magazine article?

The size of a house seems only to affect the amount of time the owners 
have to put into maintaining it, which takes away time from other 
things, including community activity.  Having larger houses does 
reflect on the needs of the owners for secondary space.  When we 
designed our commonhouse, it has no common laundry, we don't need one.  
Since the existing homes have plenty of space guest room space, we also 
planned no guest rooms in the commonhouse.  I think private yards suck 
up more energy than anything else.  My partner is a major garden head, 
and has spent lots of energy creating the landscape around our house, 
and working with others to landscape their houses.  Very little common 
landscaping has been done, although this is somewhat by design because 
the commons are mostly islands of native vegetation which require very 
little energy to maintain.  We started a small community garden which 
gets little attention.  We have planned a larger community garden, I 
suspect which will also get little attention, although we may have 
found a critical mass of gardenheads to keep it up.

Would you recommend regulating the size of houses?

No, I would let people build whatever they can afford, but I would 
build the commonhouse first. This way people might decide to build less 
house because they could rely on common elements to fill their needs.   
I would evaluate the height of houses and how that affects the houses 
or common elements around it.  We kicked around the idea in phase 2 
about having some houses be 3 bedrooms, 2 bedrooms and 1 bedrooms to 
allow for a mixture and found out that banks wouldn't loan on one 
bedroom houses.


What do you intend to do differently in phase 2 to remedy the problems?

The lots are designed in two groups of 6. The houses face into a 
central gathering node in each group, with the community garden between 
both groups.  The parking is on the outside and a central pedestrian 
corridor runs in front of the houses and connects them with each other. 
 The houses are closer to the path and there is good access from 
private to semi-private to public.  The current  layout looks like 
this, although we are still working on the concept and this is only one 
iteration:

          X       X        Garden   X     X      X
                                                                     X
   X               Node           Node
                                Secondary Parking
    X         X          X                         X         X          
       Playfield
                Parking         Shop
Parking?              Turnaround  _________
                                      Parking                       \
                                   \
                                road to
                                Phase I

The basic idea is two groups of 6 houses.  There is a large playfield 
which doubles as secondary parking. The County is making us comply to 
ridiculous parking requirements and so we are going to put in a 
"parking area" and then put playfield grass on it and only use it for 
parking during events.  One factor in our design is that there are 
several large trees on the site and we would like to keep islands of 
native vegetation which creates fingers out into our large forest 
greenbelt.  We are still working out many of the details and hope to 
have the design done by June or so.  We are on septic fields so lots 
have to be large enough to have drainfields, although we can remote 
drainfields if we wish.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood