Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Elitist lifestyle or public good?

[Paul Barton-Davis (pbd]

I think that Catherine raises some good points about the accessibility
of cohousing, but it seems to me that most of the concerns voiced in
the area of "Elitist lifestyle or public good?" seem to miss out on
the time dimension.

If cohousing is to have any more long term impact than Oneida or the
Shakers (and they certainly both have *some*, just not very much),
then it is vital that cohousing communities have some stability and
character that is independent of their members.

I live near a small suburban town called Narberth, which is often
touted as a historical example of "New Urbanism". It has an amazing
sense of cohesion and community, mostly because it seceded from its
enclosing township around 100 years ago. It has its own services, its
own main st., its own park and so on. But what is really remarkable
about Narberth is not any of its physical characteristics. Instead, I
find it really puzzling how this small town has managed to keep a
cohesive sense of community over a century or more. The population has
been through 4-5 generations since secession, and more significantly,
massive demographic changes. It was originally an extremely working
class town (hard to believe from the houses, but ...) providing
service workers to nearby wealthy communities such as
Merion. Nowadays, it is home to a substantial fraction of the (largely
middle class white) people who were living in Philadelphia, had kids
and decided they had to get out of the city *but hated the
"suburbs"*. Old timers from even a couple of generations ago recall
Narberth as a fairly scary neighbourhood, despite its community feel
even then.

I describe this because I have a gut feeling that somehow, Narberth
and all other successful long-term *UN*-intentional communities have
something that *IN*tentional communities (be they cohousing or
something more ideological) do not. Cohousing currently requires the
active involvment of its members, indeed thats part of the definition
that Katherine has offered us here. Viable long term communities
*cannot* rely on this. Instead, they have to function as statistical
ensembles: even though in any given time frame (a week, a month, a
year, a decade, a generation) its not possible to say *who* will step
up to the plate and perform certain key social roles, there are enough
people to know that *someone* will. There are no required meetings, no
particular actions necessary to demonstrate membership in the
community, yet somehow, certain geographically-based collections of
people manage to generate some real cohesiveness. Within the framework
created by the statistical appearance of certain kinds of
people/roles, individuals get on with the job of forming individual
alliances that, in aggregate but definitely not individually, define a
community.

Cohousing is typically concerned with a unit size in which this cannot
happen. Even with 100 families (rather large by most cohousing
standards) you almost certainly won't get this statistical
emergence. So instead, you have to rely on process, on explicit acts
of participation to create the community that cohousing is intended
to create. Oscar Wilde, when asked what he thought of socialism, said
that "it takes up too many Monday evenings". 

This is not to say that cohousing cannot be successful in engendering
a sense of community for its initial participants and possibly even in
neighbouring communities. But as a plan for widespread development of
community sense, it seems to me to rely to much on the active
participation of most the members. This is something that has been
demonstrated time and time again in intentional community after
intentional community to be unsustainable.

Even the oldest cohousing groups in Denmark are barely more than a
couple of generations old. They may be modelled on older communities,
but those communities were typically larger, more distributed and had
this important property of "statistical behaviour". I believe that
whenever a community loses that property and has no substitute for it,
it will, in fairly short order, lose its sense of community. This
happened with the US communes of the late 1960's/early 1970's, in
hundreds/thousands of small villages and towns across the world that
have shrunk in size, and even in large cities that have destroyed the
social mechanisms to allow statistical behaviour to emerge.

So, for now, it seems to me that cohousing is not so much elitist as
short-term. Solutions to the problem of a lack of community that are
based on the energy of a group of people are not long term
solutions. Cohousing is a better way to live, I'm sure, but on its
own, it cannot do much more than Oneida, or even Drop City. If we want
to engender a sense of community, we need structural alterations in
our society that go beyond the way we build and use our living
quarters. Without those other changes, cohousing communities are
"islands", not necessarily but possibly elitist, whose message of a
better life is unlikely to change much in the rest of the world.

enough,

--pbd

In message <Pine.SUN.3.96.971016140412.14113F-100000 [at] eskimo.com>you
write: > >(I'm not quoting the original posting for space
considerations.)  > >I think co-housing as exists is a bit on the
elitist side.  People who are >going to live in cohousing communities
need to be able to invest both the >time and money into the community,
which will often involve years of >planning, not having an immediate
place to live from all of this, etc.  >etc.  Certainly, it's only a
small part of the population that seems to be >intetrested.
(Obviously all this has been said before.)  > >I wonder how much you
can change this and still have it be co-housing.  >The extensive
planning is a large part of what forms the community both in >the
sense that what is built reflects the people, and that they become a
>community in large part by going through this process.  > >In order
for cohousing to become more accessible, it almost has to be >adopted
at a city level -- cohousing as a type of subsidised housing, so >that
it could become actually affordable.  Cohousing done by developers,
>to take some (or almost all?) of the planning weight off of the
potential >residents.  (By the way, for my tuppence, I think cohousing
done by >developers -- who are willing to work closely with the
residents -- is a >lovely idea.)  > >Would it still be cohousing,
though?  Or something that we would recognise >as cohousing?
Communities form slowly.  I think one of the functional >strengths of
cohousing is that it is so difficult to do -- people have go >through
this process together in order to become a community they not only
>have to want to be there, but they have to choose to be there and be
>willing to work their tails off.  The fact that cohousing is hard is
an >obstacle to overcome, on the one hand -- let's face it, nothing
that >requires that much work is going to be considered by urban
planners, >because mostly people don't have the energy (or at least
aren't willing to >devote it to this sort of thing) and aren't willing
to wait.  But if we >remove some of the barriers to cohousing, what do
we have left -- a lot of >smallish, hopefully affordable dwellings
connected by walkways, and a >common house.  I've seen plenty of
condos that have a lot of shared >facilities that don't become
cohousing...  why should this?  > >It would be interesting to compare
housing developments that were planned >so as to foster community with
cohousing communities, and see what the >different experiences are.
(Or has this been done?  I don't have enough >data.)  When I think of
cohousing, to me it seems that it requires buy-in >at a level that
cannot be planned by urban planners, that cannot be >legislated, and
cannot be budgeted.  I think there are ideas out of >cohousing that
are going to be very useful, and there might be better ways >of
partnering cohousing groups with urban planners.  But I have trouble
>seeing ways to leap the gap from the grass-roots sort of thing that I
see >going with cohousing, to planning on a larger scale.  > >
Catherine > >