Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Designing gathering spaces

[Elizabeth Magill (pastorlizm]

> Liz, I hear you about the complications that may happen with temporary 
> gathering spaces.  We have tilled up a temporary garden plot for this summer 
> and will certainly be gathering around that space, and there is some worry 
> from some members about people getting attached to this, when it hasn't been 
> fully thought through yet (we're doing it because people want to get out 
> there and start putting down some roots on the land, no pun intended).  But 
> otherwise I do hope that we can start putting community spaces in places 
> where they will make sense for the long-term.  Otherwise, it seems like your 
> process around yards has been less structured than some others -- would you 
> say that it has worked well, or do you wish that it had been more well 
> defined at the beginning?

It worked well for me, and somewhat well for marketing, but wasn't fair to 
newcomers. 

So even if we had more explicitly said, "go to it with your own space, but 
leave these exact places for new folk". And for gathering spaces, if we had 
asked repeatedly, "what can we do to be sure this is incorporating new folk?"

I guess I wouldn't DO it differently, I'd just be sure we talked about the 
consequences more openly along the way.

> 
> A couple other questions:  What are some successful processes that 
> communities have used to map community spaces and yards?  Is it done by a 
> committee and then presented to the others?  Or by the whole community at a 
> workshop-type event?

In my strongly felt opinion: PLEASE have a team come up with a draft. Have the 
whole community name the values to be considered in making the draft, then the 
team try to incorporate the values and then the whole community look at the 
team's draft....

> I guess I'm still trying to get clear on whether everyone out there in coho 
> land thinks this issue is pressing enough to warrant being tackled 
> immediately, or if it's okay to give everyone a very minimal yard for now 
> (5-10 feet in front and behind their house) and put off the design workshop 
> until fall when the summer marketing push has past (we are still trying to 
> sell houses, after all). 

Its fine to prioritize marketing! AND the decision to put off the decision to 
later is ALSO a decision to 1) know more about what naturally develops and 2) 
make it harder to move the spaces that will naturally develop around only half 
the community.

For example, we imagined a lot of hanging out on our common house porch. But 
for months on end it wasn't available, so we started hanging out on north leg 
porches. Once the common house porch became available, we didn't actually move 
there. Because habits die very slowly.

So decide on marketing is fine, but acknowledge that that means that the 
development of more central common spaces will need to be more intentional, and 
will be harder to do. (But if you haven't got new folk to build the second 
bunch, you don't nothing, eh? So prioritize the marketing!)

-Liz
Elizabeth Magill
www.worcesterfellowship.org