Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Vanilla CoHo

[fmancino (fmancino]

On Wed, 18 Oct 1995 BPaiss [at] aol.com wrote:

> Dan,
> (snip)
> About the Base Model:
> I challenge ANYONE to come up with a satisfactory defination of Base Model.
>  As I and at least one other have mentioned, consensus decision making in
> integral to creating a cooperative neighborhood.  Not for every decision but
> (snip)
> Zev

Sometimes it is useful to consider things in a historical 
perspective (though I know this goes against the grain of American 
thinking which often seems to 
favor the abandonment of the shackles of the past); along those lines, 
consider this from Witold Rybczynski's "To Build A Suburb":

"Whereas most people today equate suburban development with negligent 
planning and incompetent design, the earliest garden suburbs were 
distinguished precisely by the sophistication of their layouts and the 
quality of their architecture.  This was as true in North America as it 
was in Britain... Good planning and imaginative architecture made the 
garden suburbs popluar with the buying public,  but more important, they 
also assured their longevity.  Like Chesnut Hill (PA) and Mariemont (OH), 
all the garden suburbs of the 1910s and '20s have remained attractive 
places to live.  Some, such as River Oaks in Houston, Beverly Hills and 
Palos Verdes outside Los Angles, and Coral Gables near Miami, have become 
synounymous with wealth. . .  The architectural and urbanistic qualities 
of the garden suburb made them particularlly attractive-and in the long 
run drove up real estate values.  But as the example of Chesnut Hill 
shows, these places were by no means elitist.  Nor were they always 
middle class."
The article is from the Summer 95 issue of Wilson Quarterly, and 
discusses a number of still-functioning communities in the US, and 
Britain, none of which seemed to be based upon consensus-decisionmaking.  
Would anyone care to predict the form and operation of their community in, 
say, 2070?

Frank Mancino