Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Social design in Lot development model

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

Buzz wrote a long piece about the LDM vs. what he called the Danish 
Model.  I would say both can work well as social environments.  One 
thing I would highly promote is to look at the design ideas from the 
cohousing book, and particularly the ideas of:
Remote parking, pedestrian orientation
Groupings and orientations of homes to each other and the commonhouse
Gathering nodes, places outside for folks to sit and hang out (Make 
these wonderful)
Centralized pathways.
Relationship of homes to pathways.
Inside/ outside relationship of homes to commons, pathways.

In general, I heartily endorse Chuck Durrets ideas that it should be 
very effortless to be able to look out of your house and see what is 
going on in at least some of the gathering nodes.  If you have to walk 
out of your home, and take ten steps down the path to see what is 
happening, then the social design requires more effort than is likely 
to be given in most situations, especially over time.

All these social design ideas can be accomplished with either model and 
I think are key design elements for making it easy for people to bump 
into each other.  This doesn't  guarantee a community, but if you are 
designing from scratch, you might as well make it easy for people to 
get together and see what is going on.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood