Cohousing-L Mailing List: Cohousing and Intentional Communties

[stanifor (stanifor]

This started as a message to a smaller group of people, but I decided to  
share it more widely.

>From time to time, people point out that cohousing communities are  
certainly a subset of intentional communities in general.  Additionally,  
there have been previous intentional communities which meet just about  
all the tests in the definition of cohousing (eg some land coops).  So,  
the question arises, why even have a separate cohousing movement?  Why  
have separate organizations?  Separate web pages?  Different mailing  
lists?

I would like to offer my perspective on this.  Although we are able to  
formulate the definition of cohousing in bricks-and-mortar terms,  
cohousing is really a phenomenon that is best understood in marketing  
terms.  "Cohousing" is a brand, in the sense that marketers use that term  
- which is to say it's a distinct kind of product in the mind of the  
public that carries certain connotations.  People are brand conscious -  
they construct their identity (in part) by the brands they use ("I'm a  
Bud-drinker", "I drive a Mercedes", "I'm a Dilbert fan").  They use  
brands that help them to feel good about themselves, and don't use ones  
that they don't feel good about.  Most advertising and marketing is  
designed to influence the perception of a given brand so that people will  
use it more.

"Intentional Community" is also a brand, and so is "Commune".  "Commune"  
is, in the minds of most of the public, an old tired brand from the 60s  
that they don't want to be associated with.  "Intentional Community" is a  
newish brand that most people haven't heard of.  "Cohousing" is a hot  
new brand that is getting a lot of media attention.  For better or worse,  
part of the brand identity of "Cohousing" is that it is *not* "Commune".  
 It's a totally different brand.  For many people (inside the cohousing  
movement as well as outside of it), the fact that someone lives in  
"cohousing", as opposed to a "commune" or an "intentional community"  
makes a tremendous difference to how they feel about that living  
situation.

The other major aspects of the Cohousing Brand are that it involves  
friendly, middle-class, white homeowners getting along great together in  
neat looking neighbourhoods just like the 50s.  Some of you may not like  
this, but if you look at much of the media coverage, that is where the  
focus is.  Cohousing [TM] as a housing brand is very clearly distinct  
from Inner City [TM] (another housing brand that involves dangerous  
violent poor people with dark skin).  All these aspects of the brand are  
very important to its exploding popularity with consumers and consequent  
increase in sales - despite the fact that it's rather a luxury  
high-priced brand.

I note that not all these perceptions have very much to do with the  
reality of cohousing communities, communes, or intentional communities.   
(For example, there are *far* more Christian communities in the US than  
almost any other kind, but they get far less media attention than  
cohousing.)  However, these perceptions do have a *tremendous* shaping  
influence on reality in the future.  If you want to reason about what has  
happened and is going to happen to the various strands of intentional  
communities, it's very important to be able to understand things in these  
terms.  Even if you don't approve of it, it is a major influence.

For example, Don Lindemann recently described here a rather hostile  
reaction he got at a meeting of planners when he talked about cohousing.   
I suggest that what was happening there is best understood as some  
people reacting negatively to the cohousing brand image, rather than to  
the reality of particular cohousing communities.

Another example: N St Cohousing (where I used to live) has experienced a  
lot of discrimination, both from cohousers in other communites (I  
promise not to name names :-) and in media coverage (note that the recent  
SF Chronicle that Denise posted here mentioned just about every early  
cohousing community in Northern California, but not a word about N St.)   
The reason for this is not that N St doesn't fit the definition of  
cohousing, but rather that it doesn't quite fit the brand image.  It  
looks a little funky.  People who can't afford to buy a house are doing  
this thing in older low-budget homes instead of spiffy new homes.   
Students live there as well as grown-ups.  Somehow, many cohousers feel  
that it doesn't quite fit, even though they can't put their finger on  
anything that makes it not cohousing.

I should stress, before people jump down my throat, that I personally  
would be perfectly happy to consider living in a community that didn't  
call itself cohousing.  I'd be doing my best to weigh up whether I could  
get along with the folks there and enjoy the lifestyle they lived, and  
not worrying too much about what the rest of the world thought.  I admire  
people who live in "shared income communities" (which is how folks are  
trying to re-invent the "commune" brand), and I wish there were more such  
communities.  I try hard to judge people by how they treat me and not by  
how much they earn or what color their skin is.

Stuart Staniford-Chen
Cohousing Network Webweaver
Cohouser at large.