What's Cohousing?

Cohousing is a burgeoning movement in North America of groups gathering together to create housing structures that reweave a social fabric into neighborhoods that are people-friendly and earth sensible. Instead of letting banks and land developers plan residential communities, the residents-to-be actually come together themselves to design their neighborhood (or physical environment) in order to cultivate the organic growth of community.

Cars, which so easily separate people, may be kept at the periphery of the community, for example. This arrangement allows the area around living spaces to fill up with pedestrians and the stuff of interaction: gardens, walkways, bikes, sandboxes, quiet sitting areas, and open commons. Homes are built not with great expanses of private lawn and one driveway each; rather they are clustered together in a more sociable atmosphere, encouraging a reaching out from household to household.

Common facilities that weave the community together are placed in central locations. They may include laundry rooms, a large kitchen and dining for shared meals, bulk food storage areas, and space for processing and storing crops, as well as places for children and teenagers, guest rooms and workshops for wood, fiber, autos, and so on.

Through the environment it builds the community honors the individual's need for privacy as well as the group's need for social interaction. Over the last fifty years as a culture we have protected our privacy well; cohousing is an effort to rebuild the lost structures of community.