Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Elitism or Public Good

[mkiefer (mkiefer]

     The cohousing discussion at the U Berkley forum on the New Urbanism 
which Don recounts raises some provocative issues.  I recently spent a year 
as a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design investigating, 
among other things, cohousing as a model for sustainable development. I 
found the New Urbanism to be an almost obsessive topic of discussion in the 
design and planning professions. I think this is partly because it's the 
first really new paradigm since modernism. But, paradoxically, it's too 
backward-looking for those in the design professions--and there are 
many--committed to novelty above all else.  (As Stuart Brand says in "How 
Buildings Learn", "originality means throwing out what works.")  Also, its 
call for a return to the humanistic principles of design practiced almost 
unconsciously in the pre-modern era terrifies architects afraid of being 
rendered unneccessary. So, there's a lot of ambivalence.
     I encountered no hostility and a lot of curiosity about cohousing at 
the GSD, even a certain amount of false optimism.  People tended to be most 
interested in cohousing's potential  to break out of the box of traditional 
housing and site design, and maybe a little less interested in the social 
significance of the movement.
     Although I wish it were not so, I too believe that true 
cohousing--which I define as housing communities shaped in their essentials 
by their eventual occupants--is unlikely to ever be more than a 
statistically small segment of the national housing market.  Most people 
just don't care that much, and are content to choose from what the market 
offers.  But cohousing has the potential to influence  housing design far 
out of proportion to its numbers.  In market-driven housing, the very 
powerful force of risk avoidance acts to stifle innovation.  Cohousing 
removes the market risk and allows communities to be designed the way they 
want to be, without having to always look over your shoulder at the market. 
 So my prescription for how to get cohousing to be taken more seriously is 
to keep pushing the edge of the envelope with compactness (which the New 
Urbanists love but the market sometimes resists), district heating, 
composting tiolets, xeriscaping, open space preservation, and other 
forward-looking design strategies.  Make sure that, after they're built, 
communities are run well,  bank loans are repaid on schedule, and  resale 
values are maintained.  Then wait.  As Thoreau knew, the world will beat a 
path to your door.

                         Matt Kiefer
                         Peabody & Brown
                         Boston, MA------