What Is Cohousing?
Curious About Cohousing?
According to Wikipedia:
Cohousing is an intentional, self-governing cooperative community where residents live in private homes often clustered around shared space. The term originated in Denmark in the late 1960s. Families live in attached or single-family homes. As part of the communal orientation, shared spaces typically feature a common house, which may include a large kitchen and dining area, laundry, and recreational spaces. Walkways, open space, parking, playgrounds, and gardens are common examples of shared outdoor spaces designed to promote social interactions. Neighbors also often share resources like tools, babysitting, and creative skills.
Neighbors collaboratively plan and manage community activities and shared spaces while maintaining their own income and private lives. The legal structure is typically a homeowner association or housing cooperative, and some use community land trusts. To promote the common good, cohousing members regularly share meals, attend meetings, and participate in community work days. As part of cohousing’s social nature, neighbors gather for parties, games, gardening, musical performances, movies, sports, classes, and celebrations. Living in cohousing makes it easy for residents to form clubs, organize child and elder care, share information, free cycle, and carpool.
Cohousing facilitates interaction among neighbors and thereby provides social, practical, economic, and environmental benefits. With democracy in action in their cohousing community, residents also tend to be more active in civic affairs in the broader community.
What is Consensus Governance?
According to cohousing.org:
Consensus is a process for making decisions that proceeds only in the absence of principled objections. That is, a decision is affirmed when no one believes that the proposal under consideration undercuts a common value, contradicts other agreements in place, or is otherwise bad for the group. Consensus is also a highly inclusive process that protects an opportunity to hear from all voices. It requires enough time to discern the most effective way to balance the input for the group’s best benefit.
Consensus or collaborative governance is definitional to cohousing, which means most communities start with an understanding that they will be making decisions without majority votes.
Based on active participation by residents, cohousing communities are usually structured – in principle and often in architecture – to encourage interactions and the formation of rich relationships among their members. Neighbors are encouraged to cooperate within the community and to care for each other. Community involvement is a way of life. So as to promote an interdependent village-like experience where neighbors all know each other, cohousing developments are usually limited to around 20–50 homes and frequently feature large common areas where residents interact. While cohousing developments are designed to encourage community, residents have as much personal privacy as they want. Residents are able to choose how much they engage in order to find the right balance between their privacy and the community.
Decision-making in cohousing communities is often based on building a consensus within the community. Residents work together to maintain the shared space which they can all use, usually saving money. At the same time residents manage their own space in ways that appeal to them.
Cohousing communities are part of the cooperative economy in the United States and are predicted to expand rapidly in the next few decades as individuals and families seek to live more sustainably, and in community with neighbors.
More information coming soon.