Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing & traditional neighborhood movements.

[Tom Ponessa (tomp]

Tom Ponessa replies.

Mike, have a look at the earlier posting "Coho under our
Noses". If you can't find it I can forward it to you. As for Duany
his ideas are worth investigating but really it's just the built
form of the neighbourhood that is different. The result may
still be insular people in a traditional looking neighbourhood.
Once the idea is filtered through developers, marketers etc...
it gains a patina of 'cutesyness' that makes me suspect it
is only so much window dressing. And what about a mix of
incomes and people?  I've heard that Seaside (Fla) is pretty
much white and middle/upper income. That is still a traditional
suburb to me. And these things are built at a large scale which
is beyond even the largest Coho. 

But at least it is a 
welcome change from a street of garages with houses
behind. We have a couple of Duany's up here in the planning
stages (at least one Gov't sponsored due to land from a cancelled airport).
That one IS radical because it is planned as a self sufficient
town with jobs and fibre optics for tele-commuters. By addressing the
fragmentation of life, and offering the chance to live and work in a 
smaller region, this development shows some real promise.
No matter what the form, if a suburb can't support life in many or
all of its facets, it is still a suburb.

Community is the people, not the development.