Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Age Diversity in Groups

[Diane Simpson (coho]

Yet in chapter 37, (page 200) "House Clusters" the same author writes:

"The clusters seem to work best if they have between 8 and 12 houses each.
With one representative from each family, this is the number of people that
can sit around a common meeting table, can talk to each other directly,
face to face, and can therefore make wise decisions about the land they
hold in commmon. With 8 or 10 households, people can meet over a kitchen
table, exchange news on the street and in the gardens, and generally,
without much special attention, keep in touch with the whole of the group.
When there are more than 10 or 12 homes forming a cluster, this balance is
strained. We therefore set an upper limit of around 12 on the number of
households that can be naturally drawn into a cluster. Of course, the
average size for the clusters might be less, perhaps around 6 or 8; and
clusters of 3, 4, or 5 homes can work perfectly well."

--Diane(:^]
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>Howard Landman HOWARD [at] POLY.POLYAMORY.ORG
>wrote:
>
>In "A Pattern Language" they analyze the distribution of ages in the
>population and what it means for kids in a housing cluster.  The
>conclusion is that to have a reasonable probablility of having enough
>kids in each age group for each other to play with, you need to have
>over 50 families in the cluster.  This assumes the cluster roughly
>matches the age distribution of the population at large.
>
>

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      @@@@       Diane Simpson  http://jpcohousing.org       @@@@
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