Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: ecovillage vs cohousing distinctions

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

I've wondered about the ecovillage vs cohousing distinctions.
I'm much more familiar with cohousing but read about ecovillages
some.

Some interesting observations in this thread so far.
Clearly actual examples of each have characteristics that
overlap.

One typical difference that I've noticed is that ecovilllages
are more likely to be established "smaller" than than they aspire
to be.  This is illustrated by a recent email from elsewhere:

> I live at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Missouri.
> DR has as its stated goal growing to be a village of 500-1,000, and
> we are about 50 people currently.

Whereas most (but not all) cohousing communities are constructed
at one time to house their final population.

I imagine an ecovillages may also build a cohousing portion
initially with the intent to build additional cohousing communities
as well as enterprizes, coops, stores etc later to make them more full
function villages.  This sort of describes Ecovillage at Ithaca which has
it's third cohousing community in the planning stages.

Building a full function village is an even bigger undertaking than
building a cohousing community and building it in stages and evolving
is more practical.  The financing piece alone probably dictates this.
Imagine the meeting schedule if you tried to plan it all in advance :)

The ultimate size of ecovillages remains to be determined in most cases.
It will be interesting to see how well they have succeeded in 10 - 20
years.  Curiously note that current cohousing communities often have more
residents than current ecovillages even tho the latter hopes to be
considerably bigger.

Diana Leafe Christian, publisher/editor, Ecovillages newsletter
http://www.EcovillageNews.org who is a subscriber to Cohousing-L
will hopefully get to addressing this topic when time permits
(we exchanged enough email to find out she's currently busy.)

Fred

--
Fred H. Olson  Minneapolis,MN 55411  USA        (near north Mpls)
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