Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: New Urbanism and CoHousing

[Paul Barton-Davis (pbd]

scowley [at] aclis.lib.utah.edu wrote:

>Retrofitting a suburb to encourage interaction is a good idea.  But
>interaction is simply not enough.  In a cohousing community we have at
>least 3 different factors which are crucial to the success of a modern
>community:
>
>1.  Built Consciousness.  By this I mean a shared experience which
>builds a common set of understandings and sense of history leading to
>a sense of ownership in the place.

And how on earth do you propose to help this "built consciousness"
survive the typical patterns of migration, let alone generational
succession, that typify contemporary America ? What happens to this
"built consciousness" when only 10% of the people with the shared
experience are left ?

Communities built around shared experience are short-term. Communities
built around good social/architectural/ecological/economic design can
take a shot at being long term.

>2.  Intentional Governing Structure.  Again this lends itself towards
>a crucial personal sense of investment.  It also imposes a mechanism
>by which _Personal Accountability_ to a community is established. This
>is currently a rare phenomenon in American life.  It creates a vital
>feedback loop by which the local community can remain a dynamic social
>organism.

Why do you suppose that this type of governing structure has gone?
Let me make a proposal: humans have typically been more interested in
building systems that appear to work most of the time than in having
to continue to work on their maintainance. What we have in the broader
"western" democratic industrial societies are social systems that
*appear* to work (often by hiding costs) and therefore allow most of
us to forget about them. This is not an accident. People don't want to
spend their time on governance, and so they build systems where they
don't have to, or need do so to a lesser extent.

>3.  Design by Future Residents (and future mortgage payors).  Matt
>Kiefer correctly states that modernism is dead.  Good riddance.
>Architectural egos are responsible for some of the worst problems of
>our environment.  If architects are "Afraid of being rendered
>unnecessary" as Mr. Kiefer says, then they should shift their
>paradigm, and start seeing themselves as service providers instead of
>an elite with a license to impose their brand of aesthetics upon us.

I'm not an architect, but this a licentious description of the
trade. Most architects are utterly frustrated with the gaudy desires
of their clients. Those housing developments that embody the worst of
housing design don't look that way because an architect thought it was
the right thing to do to permanize his or her ego. It looks that way
because there is a belief about what people want, in addition to the
many compromises brokered between architects and developers. Take a
look at a magazine like Fine Homebuilding, and in addition to houses
built by people with a lot more money than most of us, you'll see the
often wonderful results of architects working with clients and
actually using aesthetics grounded in people's real experience instead
of some fictitious idea of what the market wants, an idea supported
mostly by land developers, not architects.

--p