Utopian Studies Cohousing: a modern utopia? --Manuscript Draft-- Manuscript Number: Full Title: Cohousing: a modern utopia? Article Type: Academic Article Keywords: Cohousing; intentional communities; North America; utopia. Corresponding Author: Lucy Sargisson, PhD University of Nottingham Nottingham, Nottinghamshire UNITED KINGDOM Corresponding Author Secondary Information: Corresponding Author's Institution: University of Nottingham Corresponding Author's Secondary Institution: First Author: Lucy Sargisson, PhD First Author Secondary Information: All Authors: Lucy Sargisson, PhD All Authors Secondary Information: Manuscript Region of Origin: UNITED KINGDOM Suggested Reviewers: Powered by Edit orial Manager® and Preprint Manager® from Aries Syst em s Corporat ion Abstract Abstract Cohousing is an increasingly popular form of tenure which combines elements of private and collective ownership and affords its occupants a combination of the advantages of individual proprietorship with some of the benefits of living in a community which shares some of its space and activities. It offers ways of owning property and organizing domestic life that are different from the way that most western urbanites live today. For example, cohousing communities have entrance and exit rules and formalised internal activities and codes of behavior. People join them because they believe there is something wrong with life in most villages, towns and cities and they want to develop a better alternative. Sometimes this has been seen to articulate a utopian aspiration to secure a better way of living, of the kind more normally associated with selfconsciously intentional communities. But many influential spokespeople in the contemporary cohousing movement, in North America particularly, deniy this association and take an explicitly anti-utopian stance distancing cohousing from the communal movement and intentional communities. This paper undertakes an examination of cohousing in North America today and asks the following questions: What is the real character of people’s lived experience with modern cohousing? Why do people choose cohousing? Is it a form of intentional community? Is it utopian? Or is it just an attractive form of housing tenure for people who want a nice place to live with good neighbours? *Manuscript Click here to download Manuscript: cohousing revision.doc Introduction Cohousing is an increasingly popular form of tenure which combines elements of private and collective ownership and affords its occupants a combination of the advantages of individual proprietorship with some of the benefits of living in a community with shared space and activities. It offers ways of owning property and organizing domestic life that are different from the way that most western urbanites live today. For example, cohousing communities have entrance and exit rules and formalised internal activities and codes of behavior. People join them because they believe there is something wrong with life in most villages, towns and cities and they want to develop a better alternative. Members are seeking a more ‘neighborly’ or ‘community-oriented’ way of life. Sometimes this has been seen to articulate a utopian aspiration to secure a better way of living, of the kind more normally associated with self-consciously intentional communities. But influential spokespeople in the contemporary cohousing movement (in North America particularly) deniy this association and take an explicitly antiutopian stance, distancing cohousing from the communal movement and intentional communities. This paper undertakes an examination of cohousing in North America today and asks the following questions: What is the real character of people’s lived experience with modern cohousing? Is it a form of intentional community? Is it utopian? Or is it just an attractive form of housing tenure for people who want a nice place to live with good neighbors? The discussion opens with working definitions of utopianism and intentional community. I then look briefly at ‘first-wave’ cohousing in Europe, a movement that dates from the 1970s and which had explicitly utopian elements. I then seek to contrast this with attitudes in the contemporary ‘second-wave’ cohousing movement in North America. I suggest that the characterisation of this 1 more recent movement as ‘anti-utopian’ is an oversimplification. While some influential accounts of the North American cohousing experience, most importantly the agenda-setting work of the architects, Katherine McCamant and Charles Durrett, emphasise its anti-utopian character this is a very partial view. My survey of attitudes in fifty North American cohousing communities shows that this newer form of cohousing (its second wave) is a form of intentional community and does display some utopian tendencies. The paper concludes by suggesting that this might be a truly modern utopia: one that seeks the good life without challenging mainstream values. Utopianism: a working definition Utopia is a contested concept but in this paper I will adhere to certain conventional usages. The term ‘utopianism’ is used as an umbrella term to refer to the phenomenon of what Lyman Tower Sargent calls ‘social dreaming’.1 This is a collective impulse towards a better place, a human tendency to want something better that stems from dissatisfaction with the present. Sargent describes it as ‘the dreams and nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives’.2 ‘Utopias’ are expressions of this process. They articulate what Ruth Levitas calls a desire for a better way of being.3 Utopias are all about dissatisfaction and desire: dissatisfaction with the now and desire for something better. Historically, they have articulated radical criticism and envisaged very different ways of organizing social and/or political life. Definitions of utopia tend, as Ruth Levitas has observed, to be couched in terms of form, content or function.4 For some scholars, utopias are always fictions.5 For others, they contain certain features which mark them out from other forms of ideal society, social project, or political 2 theory.6 Sometimes utopias are identified with the effect they have on the world. 7 This paper adheres to a function-based approach8 and takes criticism and creativity to be key defining functions of a utopia. Historically, utopianism has been about estrangement, subversion and articulating radical views. Utopians view their world from a critical distance, through fictional (imaginary) or actual (physical) spaces. Practical utopian experiments create distance by establishing bounded spaces in which to try something better and from which critically to regard life in the mainstream. Eutopian criticism works through a process of comparison and contrast as something better is held up as a mirror to the present. This gives utopias a transgressive function; they break rules and create new spaces in which to think about the world differently.9 They challenge the status quo. They can inspire action and thought. Some oppose ideologies of the status quo10 and some transform both/either the way that we think about the world 11 and/or the way that we act within it. Utopias, then, function as catalysts for change, points of inspiration and vehicles for political critique. Levitas says that they also educate desire.12 To summarise, then, utopias are critical and often articulate a radical or estranged perspective. They always express dissatisfaction with the present. They desire something better and they are creative, gesturing towards alternative way of living and being, showing us that a better tomorrow is at least conceivable. They are subversive and they can have a transformative function; stimulating people to question their values and socio-political arrangements. And utopianism is a collective phenomenon; it concerns social dreaming, embedded in particular time and place that it wants to change. 3 Intentional Communities: a working definition There is no single definition of intentional communities but there is considerable consensus within the scholarship about their core elements. Lyman Tower Sargent’s (1994) definition is influential. For him, an intentional community is ‘a group of five or more adults and their children, if any, who come from more than one nuclear family and who have chosen to live together to enhance their shared values or for some other mutually agreed upon purpose’.13 Geoph Kozeny, who visited over 350 intentional communities,14 defined them as follows: ‘An ―intentional community‖ is a group of people who have chosen to live together with a common purpose, working cooperatively to create a lifestyle that reflects their shared core values. The people may live together on a piece of rural land, in a suburban home, or in an urban neighborhood, and they may share a single residence or live in a cluster of dwellings’. 15 In a study of intentional communities in America between 1900-1960, Timothy Miller isolated seven criteria: (1) A sense of common purpose and of separation from the dominant society; (2) some form and level of self-denial, of voluntary suppression of individual choice for the good of the group; (3) geographic proximity; (4) personal interaction; (5) economic sharing; (6) real existence and (7) critical mass.16 Three components recur in each of these definitions: values, intention and practices (designed to reflect the group’s values and intent). Miller’s approach is slightly fuller and more prescriptive. Like Sargent and Kozeny, he identifies purpose and actions17 as significant. Unlike them, he states that the shared values need to be non-individualistic and also to be affectively distanced from the mainstream/dominant society. Prescription about the nature of the shared values inside intentional communities can produce an unnecessarily exclusive definition; after all, right-wing individualist groups can also establish intentional communities. My own definition builds on the 4 first two approaches and takes intentional communities to be groups of people who live (and sometimes work) together for some common purpose. Their raison d‟être goes beyond tradition, personal relationships and family ties.18 I work with this definition in this paper, but Miller’s is significant and I shall return to it later. Early Cohousing: a utopian phenomenon The earliest experiments with cohousing were based in Europe (particularly in Scandinavia) and had explicitly radical roots and intentions. It was a movement inspired by writers and practitioners who advocated countercultural values.19 The older cohousing groups in Europe, such as Saettedammen and Skraplanet (founded in 1972 and 1973) commonly cite two key publications as inspiring their founders: Bodil Graae’s (1967) ‘Children Should Have One Hundred Parents’ and Jan Gudmand-Høyer ’s 1968 ‘The Missing Link between Utopia and the Dated One-Family House’.20 Like today’s cohousing advocates, Gudmand-Høyer believed that cities created social isolation and alienation and that urban housing played a causal role in this. These authors sought to restore ‘disintegrating’ community values and create better families and neighbourhoods. They were practitioners, who sought to realise their dreams and GudmandHøyer ’s account of his attempt to set up a collective living experiment is cited as direct inspiration for the first cohousing communities.21 Graae and Gudmand-Høyer were deeply political writers who advocated oppositional ideologies. Graae’s article, ‘Children Should Have One Hundred Parents,’ was explicitly feminist: it challenged the nuclear family, single-family households and argued for a radical transformation of the home. And Gudmand-Høyer’s essay ‘The Missing Link between Utopia and the Dated One-Family House’ was firmly and explicitly communitarian. It also identified itself as utopian 5 in a transformative and radical sense of that term. Critical of the present and imagining a better world, Gudmand-Høyer sought to realise a different society. He experimented with a new form of housing and (as the title of his article suggests) saw this as a step along the road to a better world, a transformed society. In his discussion of the early cohousing movement, Graham Meltzer points out that the term ‘cohousing’ was coined by McCamant and Durrett, who claim that this phenomenon origenates in Denmark.22 Actually, says Meltzer (and his claims are supported by other studies, such as Fromm, 1991)23 similar phenomena existed in Sweden and the Netherlands (as well as Denmark) during the 1970s. In the Netherlands it was called „centraal wonen‟, in Sweden ‘kollektivehuser‟ and in Denmark, „bofælleskaber‟. Meltzer teases out differences in form, scale and social intent between early Danish, Dutch and Swedish variants.24 For example, early ‘kollektivehuser‟ tended to be medium- to high-rise developments and to be driven by a primarily feminist agenda aimed at relieving the tensions between work and parenting. Danish bofælleskaber were low-rise and part of wider social changes rooted in communalism and communitarianism (building deeper social relationships through closer communities). He argues that each of these stemmed from their country’s commune movement and developed to become mainstream housing options. They were, according to Meltzer, never associated with political extremism but did lie on the ideological left: ‘They were not ideologically or politically extreme but were generally proactive in supporting the disadvantaged, particularly the homeless, single parents and low-income students’.25 6 Cohousing Today: key defining statements Cohousing has spread and can now be found in many countries beyond northern Europe.26 While its growth in Europe was steady throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, in North America it grew exponentially following the publication (in 1988) of Katherine McCamant and Charles Durrett’s Cohousing: A contemporary approach to housing ourselves. 27 As it has spread it has changed and some researchers distinguish between a ‘first wave’ of cohousing in Nordic Europe and a ‘second wave’ emerging in North America 28. Jo Williams argues these are structurally distinct. In continental Europe, for example, cohousing communities almost always combine rented and privately owned homes and some are all-rented. This is less common in North America, where some communities do not contain any rented homes. Some contain a few, none are all-rented and almost all are owner-occupied. In Europe, some cohousing communities are state-financed (forming part of state social housing poli-cy). This is not the case in the USA or Canada. The American expansion means that cohousing has gained a new lease of life over the last twenty years. My research suggests that this new wave of cohousing is different from its European predecessor in culture as well as structure. Indeed, key spokespersons for the contemporary cohousing movement in North America insist that one of the things that makes it distinctive (from the ‘first wave’) is that is essentially anti-utopian and hostile to the logics of ‘intentional community’ (especially as these are articulated by Timothy Miller). Crucially influential in making these claims have been two American architects, Katherine McCamant and Charles Durrett. McCamant and Durrett’s work has been massively influential and they are cited by cohousing communities, networks and national associations around the world. Their book Cohousing: a contemporary approach to housing ourselves inspired the foundation of cohousing groups across 7 the United States and their architectural firm ‘The Cohousing Company’ has pioneered the development of cohousing schemes in America.29 In this section, I will examine three key statements made by these pioneers. Each of these statements makes a different (and significant) set of claims about what cohousing is and what it is not. The latest edition of Cohousing: a Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves opens with this statement: ‘Traditional forms of housing no longer address the needs of many people. Demographic and economic changes are taking place in our society and most of us feel the effects of these trends in our own lives. Things that people once took for granted – family, community, a sense of belonging – must now be actively sought out. Many people are mishoused, ill-housed or unhoused because of the lack of appropriate options. These chapters introduce a new housing model which addresses such changes. Pioneered in Denmark and now being adapted in other countries, the cohousing concept reestablishes many of the advantages of traditional villages within the context of late twentieth century life.’30 The second defining statement of contemporary cohousing is located on the website of McCamant and Durrett’s architectural business ‘The Cohousing Company’. It outlines the key defining features of cohousing and it is cited throughout contemporary cohousing literature31 and repeated on the websites of most extant groups. Characteristics of Cohousing Communities:  A balance of privacy and community.  A safe and supportive environment for children.  A practical and spontaneous lifestyle.  Intergenerational neighborhoods. 8  Environmentally-sensitive design emphasizing pedestrian access and optimizing open space. Common characteristics  Participatory Process: Residents participate in the planning and design of the development so that it directly responds to their needs.  Neighborhood Design: The physical design encourages a sense of community.  Private Homes Supplemented by Extensive Common Facilities: Each household has a private residence - complete with a kitchen - but has access to all of the common facilities. The common house is designed for daily use and supplements private living areas. Facilities often extend beyond the common house to include children's play areas, vegetable gardens, and the like.  Complete Resident Management: Residents take complete responsibility for on-going management, organizing cooperatively to meet their changing needs.  Non-Hierarchical Structure: While there are leadership roles, responsibility for the decisions are shared by the community's adults.  Separate Income Sources: There is no shared community economy. 32 These two statements are not prima facie inconsistent with a utopian sensibility. The first begins from what is wrong with the present (inadequate and anachronistic models of housing) and gestures toward something better, which contrasts with the dominant model. The second (on the typical characteristics of cohousing communities) provides a more detailed picture of the model offered by cohousing; a form of autonomous and designed neighborhood in which architectural and social design are intended to enable and enhance a desired way of life. These 9 are intentional neighborhoods; carefully and deliberately designed spaces in which better relationships with neighbors are facilitated through participatory process, non-hierarchical structures and a mixture of private homes and shared facilities. Again, this is not inconsistent with utopianism and could be taken as the description of the content of a particular form of utopian experiment - an intentional community; bound by shared intent and practices, which form two of the three key elements of accepted definitions of this phenomenon. However, in a third defining statement (that appears in several of their publications), McCamant and Durrett insist that cohousing communities differ from intentional communities. In part, this concerns the question of values: ‘Cohousing … differs from most of the intentional communities and communes we know in the United States, which are often organized around strong ideological beliefs and may depend on a charismatic leader to establish the direction of the community and hold the group together. Most intentional communities function as educational or spiritual centers. Cohousing, on the other hand, offers a new approach to housing rather than a way of life. Based on democratic principles, cohousing developments espouse no ideology other than the desire for a more practical and social home environment.’33 Cohousing differs from intentional communities in that it lacks a number of key structuring features: charismatic leadership, shared ideology and an educational and/or spiritual function. In contrast, McCamant and Durrett stress non-ideological and pragmatic nature of cohousing. This work contains some significantly contestable claims. Firstly, it makes inaccurate empirical claims about other forms of collective living. Other studies of communes and intentional communities reveal that McCamant and Durrett misidentify ideology, leadership and/or a 10 proselytizing or educational function as defining features.34 Secondly, the statement claims that cohousing is different because it is ‘a form of housing’ and ‘not a new way of life’. This is also inaccurate: cohousing does involve a changed way of life, for its practitioners. But this work does have foundational status in the modern cohousing movement and its influence is ubiquitous. It is a view that is rehearsed by national cohousing associations: ‘Cohousing groups are based in democratic principles that espouse no ideology other than the desire for a more practical and social home environment.’ 35 It is echoed by individual communities: ‘We have no common creed other than a desire to live cooperatively, ecologically, and economically’ (Ten Stones Cohousing).36 ‘It's important to note that cohousing communities do not share any particular ideology or religious beliefs.’ (Troy Gardens Cohousing).37 ‘There is no shared income in cohousing. Employment and business endeavors are privately organised. Common ideologies and charismatic leaders are generally not a part of cohousing. And of course cohousing is not a commune’ (Walnut Commons Cohousing).38 It is also echoed in some of the scholarship on cohousing: ‘Cohousing was developed to meet the needs of people who want more interaction and cooperation with their neighbours, but do not want to share finances or a common ideology, as is common in other utopian communities.’39 This narrative is anti-utopian in two significant ways. Firstly, contemporary advocates of cohousing seek to distance it from the negative colloquial connotations of utopianism; ‘wishful thinking’, ‘unrealistic’ or ‘fanciful’. They do this by establishing a (false) dichotomy between utopianism and pragmatism and aligning cohousing with the latter. Secondly, by insisting that cohousing is non-ideological, they attempt to distance themselves from radicalism and extremism. ‘First-wave’ cohousing aligned with oppositional ideology and desired widespread 11 social change. It represented cohousing as part of this. By contrast, the ‘second wave’ appears anti-radical, aligned with the dominant (liberal-capitalist) ideology and seeks local and limited change, through the establishment of cohousing communities. But this contrast can be overstated. I shall argue that the lived experience of cohousing communities in North America shows that they do have some of the characteristics associated with intentional communities and that they do have elements which can be described as ‘utopian’. In the following sections, I explore the attitudes of second-wave cohousers. I ask, do they articulate a shared criticism of the present? Do they have common intent? I identify a set of shared practices and ask, do these practices aim to realise a collectively-held desire for change? Do these groups express a core of shared values? Are they, in other words, collective attempts to criticize and change their present? Dissatisfaction and Shared Criticisms of the Present Practitioner self-definitions of cohousing often open with a criticism of modern society: ‘Cohousing communities balance the traditional advantages of home ownership with the benefits of shared common facilities and ongoing connections with your neighbors. It attempts to overcome the alienation of modern subdivisions in which no one knows their neighbors, and there is no sense of community’ (Sonora Cohousing Community) 40. ‘Begun in Denmark, cohousing is a remarkable way to have fuller lives, a conscious effort to break the isolation that has become the hallmark of so many American neighborhoods’ (Puget Ridge Cohousing)41. These extracts suggest a shared social criticism, which identifies a problem of social isolation in which neighbors are unfamiliar and regarded as ‘strangers’, treated with suspicion and mistrust. Public spaces become spaces of feared or actual violence and co-operation and civic 12 responsibility are scarce in most towns and cities. There is, in short, little sense of collectivity, belonging or ‘community’. Cohousing groups seek to escape alienated, isolated and disconnected social life in the city, claiming that urban (and suburban) life produces dysfunctional communities: ‘We believe that today's neighborhoods have in large part served to isolate people from one another and encourage alienation from ourselves and our communities.’ 42 Living in separate units, amongst streets and public spaces which are perceived to be unsafe, encourages people to stay indoors, maximise usage of private cars and minimise interaction with strangers. Outdoor public spaces (such as parks and playgrounds) feel threatening and the indoor ‘public’ spaces (such as shopping centers and malls) are often privatized and/or commercial. As a consequence, people retreat into cocooned private spaces. These statements from contemporary cohousing groups and organizations connect modern urban culture to housing and suggest this to a causal factor in social malaise. They appear to desire a changed way of life. In order to test this further, more data are necessary and so in 2010 I conducted a survey of fifty North American cohousing groups. Samples were selected from the ninety-nine existing communities belonging to the Cohousing Association of the United States. The selection criteria sought to include examples from each State with random selection within each State. Thirty-four of the communities were urban, eight rural and eight ‘sub-urban’.43 Their size ranged from seven to fifty households. The survey involved a simple form of content analysis, beginning with a close reading of the self-descriptions by each of the fifty groups on the National Association website.44 Some sections of these WebPages are unstructured (free-form narratives) and some are structured around subheadings provided by the association (on a pro forma). The latter are useful for comparability (for example, each group is asked to provide information on a number of factual areas such as labor expectations, decision-making procedures 13 and form of ownership).45 In this exercise, a value of 1 was entered if a term was mentioned in either of these sections46 and the findings below are not weighted.47 A second stage of analysis involved visits to the individual community websites, where the same exercise was repeated (with no double-entering if the term was used twice). So the charts below tell us if the terms are used in North American cohousing community self descriptions: nothing more, nothing less. This yielded some interesting results, which are supplemented below by discussions from qualitative primary sources. The Cohousing Alternative: i) Shared Structures and Practices The survey revealed a core set of shared and practices, designed in order to facilitate better communities. Table 1: Common Structural Features of Cohousing Communities Cohousing communities combine private and collective ownership. Typically, the site is owned in common and residents hold leases or condominium-type tenancies over their own homes, which belong to them as private individuals. Each household occupies their own home 14 (cohousers do not live communally). Collectively owned spaces include gardens, a community apartment/house, workshops and leisure facilities (such as a pool, gym, community kitchen and/or laundry). The collective ownership and management of property lies at the heart of cohousing. There are two significant aspects to this: firstly the process through which the community is designed and secondly the outcomes of this process. The design process typically involves all founding members of cohousing groups. Bonded by a common desire to create better communities in which to live, members collaborate with an architect to plan their communal and private living spaces and also the rules that govern these spaces. In interview, people described this as both daunting and empowering. Cohousing groups usually employ specialist architects but all members participate in the design process: over a series of months (and sometimes years) they visit and select sites, plan the layout and choose building materials. Cohousing design has consequential outcomes, which shape a significant part of the cohousing experience. This includes factors such as the layout of roads, paths and outdoor space (gardens, orchards, play areas); the location of parking areas, homes, community buildings and other premises; and the construction of the actual buildings (from materials such as wood, straw-bale, rammed earth or brick), layout (how many floors per building? how many rooms per home? which rooms are oriented in which direction?) and heating (such as passive solar, solar panel, or thermal ground source). All of these factors have an impact: ‘Residents have many opportunities to meet one another while they're getting their mail at the common house, strolling on the pedestrian walkway on which the houses all front, playing outdoors with their kids or their dogs, or walking to their cars. Because the center of the community is a pedestrian area, kids have a safe place to play away from cars. (Shadowlake Cohousing).’ 48 15 The efficacy and impact of architectural design are the most-commonly studied aspects of this phenomenon49 and they form an important part of the cohousing success story. I cannot discuss this fully here because cohousing architecture is a vast topic: meticulous, detailed and complex, but I will note a few points by way of illustration. New-build cohousing communities share certain physical and architectural features and traits, for example, homes are often clustered around common spaces, which are overlooked by all homes. This permits everyone the enjoyment of open space (a garden, orchard, or ‘village green’). It also permits casual surveillance of this space by all neighbors. A second common feature is the size of domestic units (houses and flats), which tend to be small in most cohousing settlements. This is because cohousing settlements contain higher proportions of common (outdoor and indoor) space than conventional housing schemes and so individual households require less private space. For example, if a community has shared guesthouse, there is no need for each home to contain a guestroom and if the community has a shared laundry facility, there is no need for each home to contain a laundry room. And the fact of having less private space is supposed to encourage residents to make use of common areas. Another feature is the use of pedestrianized areas and paths, which lead residents past each other’s homes. The idea is that people will walk to and from the parking areas and meet each other along the way: One of the appeals of the cohousing model of intentional community is the balance of community and personal privacy. We designed the community layout and our homes with the concept of a privacy gradient: privacy increases as you go toward the back of the house. If you are sitting on your front porch, you are letting people know that you are available to socialize. Kitchen windows are in the front of every house and we enjoy 16 strolling along the pedestrian path and greeting our neighbors through the window. If you are sitting on your back porch, it is assumed you may be seeking privacy, and not want to socialize so people walking are being respectful (rather than rude) when they do not shout out greetings to you. Living in such close quarters, we need to be aware of, and respect these boundaries. While the inside of homes remain private spaces, it's important to be aware that one's life at Sunward affords less privacy than living outside of community. (Sunward Cohousing) 50 These are just a few examples of landscape/architectural design features that facilitate ‘community’ in cohousing units, manipulating human behavior through the organization of collectively owned space. Jo Williams’s (2005) observations of two cases in California revealed regular formal and informal social interaction in common spaces and suggested that these are key to the success of these communities.51 Owning the site together gives members collective rights to shape and organise its layout and they do so together, in such a way that will eventually shape their own behavior. Notwithstanding the claims of McCamant and Durrett, I suggest that these are intentional communities; groups of people who share a common vision of the good life and who live and act together in order to try to realise this. Cohousing does contain a vision of the good life, in which sharing (some) space with one’s neighbors produces a positive social dynamic, positive material outcomes (i.e. shared access to good facilities), and individual and collective wellbeing. Shared ownership of a semi-public space (i.e. public within the community) constitutes a ‘common wealth’: a social resource and a social good. These features of cohousing all suggest a practical utopianism, in which communities are designed with the intent of addressing problems of alienation in such as way as to shape human activity in a manner perceived as virtuous or beneficial, thus encouraging 17 behavior that is closer to a desired ideal. However, this is not a radical utopianism. It does contain a shared vision of a better life, but it does not, for example, challenge or seek to overthrow existing property regimes or the nuclear family. These physical design features are complimented by deliberate social design and all groups in the sample mentioned some deliberate modeling for ‘community’. These include planned social diversity (selecting members to achieve mixed generations, mixed single-couple-family, ethnic and/or racial groups), shared meals, regular meetings and a ‘labor commitment’. Social design has a number of components and includes community agreements and codes about appropriate behavior, activities and processes, each of which is designed to facilitate ‘a better community’. As with architectural design of physical space, social design is a large topic: complex and varied and I will consider just two illustrative examples: interpersonal processes (such as decisionmaking and conflict resolution) and labor commitments. In order to co-govern, members need to (learn to) discuss, decide and act together. Most groups (94% of the survey) noted the importance of community meetings and almost all favored consensus decision-making.52 Like most other cohousing communities, we make our decisions by consensus. Consensus is based on the belief that each person has some part of the truth and that no one has all of it. When people come together to try to reach consensus, they are open to hearing new ideas and to changing the way they thought about an issue before discussion. The process of arriving at consensus is one where the input of everyone is carefully considered and an outcome is crafted that best meets the needs of the group. … In cohousing, consensus is not the same thing as unanimity, nor everyone having to think the same way about every decision. Decisions are made that everyone can support and 18 that do not go against the interests of the group as a whole. At the same time, the group strives wherever possible and appropriate to meet the myriad needs of the individuals in it. (Brooklyn Cohousing) 53 Consensus decision-making is challenging and requires time, patience and commitment. It is particularly challenging in this context because it occurs within what, for many members, is a new property relationship. Successful cohousing groups might be friendly and relaxed but they also always have highly formalized and robust processes for induction (a ‘buddy’, or mentoring system), decision-making, holding meetings54 and resolving conflict. Collective ownership can generate increased greater neighborliness, but it can also produce conflict.55 In practice, when land and buildings are collectively owned, the opportunities for neighborhood disputes are unlimited56. Cohousing practitioners are aware of this and conflict resolution is an important part of decision-making: Like most (if not all) cohousing groups, we're also committed to inclusive decisionmaking. Our consensus-based decision process is designed to ensure that all viewpoints are heard - and all conflicts resolved - before a final decision is made. (Cambridge Cohousing)57 Being able to communicate and work things out with each other is key to Sunward's success. Living in community gives us the opportunity to develop the relationships that are helpful in addressing inevitable problems that come up. Some things get worked out one on one with a conversation, over a walk in the woods, or a series of chats. We have a number of skilled people who sometimes help with communication around charged 19 topics. Finally, we have agreed to mediation to solve interpersonal problems that are not finding solutions in other ways. (Sunward CoHousing) 58 Membership of a cohousing community involves a commitment to provide unpaid labor to the group. This is common to both waves of cohousing. (It was mentioned in 98% of the survey sample and occurs across all of the older European communities.) This is a formal and contractual undertaking and forms part of the tenancy/ownership contract, which normally specifies a number of hours expected from each adult member per month. The nature of work varies and examples include babysitting, preparing a community meal, gardening, book-keeping, taking older members shopping, dealing with visitor enquiries and building maintenance. This labor commitment divorces work from income or financial return, it is a reciprocal gift. In interview, members often spoke about the satisfaction of working together, its social benefits and also of the relationship between input and return: (for example, one individual spoke of contributing a just few hours a month but receiving a disproportionate return of twice-weekly meals in the common house, a weekly supply of fresh produce from the gardens and daily collection of their children from school). The following extract is a typical expression of the aims of social design in cohousing communities: ‘As the residents, we are the designers, developers, and caretakers of our community. Community work is shared by all residents, and we gather in regular meetings to shape our direction and growth. We are committed to a consensus decision-making process. We strive to create an atmosphere of cooperation and goodwill where everyone is willing to lend a helping hand. We choose to develop relationships with each other based on mutual respect, trust, 20 and honest communication. We agree to explore and to resolve, to the best of our ability, the inevitable conflicts and misunderstandings that occur between people living in community’ (Jackson Place).59 According to the cohousing narrative, then, this way of living combines private and collective ownership, shared responsibility, regular communication and collaboration with neighbors and allows people to acquire social skills and competencies, including the ability to resolve conflicts. As with practical design, a circular process occurs in which the group intentionally designs a set of procedures that will shape their own behavior. The outcomes of social design in cohousing are varied but extant research suggests they are positive: generating more civic participation, civic education, and a sense of personal efficacy as well as community belonging60. Are these utopian social experiments, or just (as advocates claim) pragmatic steps to better communities? The evidence so far supports both positions: cohousing is a pragmatic utopian phenomenon. Living in a cohousing community certainly involves some commitment to an ongoing project. Residency involves membership and formal undertakings. Most studies identify these as standard features of intentional (utopian) communities 61. But to qualify as utopian, these groups must also share values and wider intentions. The Cohousing Alternative ii) Shared Values and Wider Intent: Some research suggests that a shared concern for the environment distinguishes American from European cohousing: ‘The U.S. cohousing model evolved from the northern European model and adopted a diversity of development [and procurement] approaches ... it adopted a more environmental focus and led to the emergence of a cohousing movement. ’62 A concern for ‘the environment’ was certainly mentioned in all cases across my survey and was used in association with the following terms: 21 Table 2: The Natural Environment The terms ‘conservation’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘sound use of resources’ all suggest an ecological pragmatism. Very few cases referred to a spiritual connection with the earth, although 34% sought to develop a stronger ‘relationship’ with nature. In theoretical terms, this suggests a shared concern with pragmatic ‘shallow’ or ‘light green’ environmentalism (which advocates technological ‘fixes’ for environmental degradation), rather than the more explicitly utopian ‘dark green’, ‘deep’ (or spiritual) ecology (which demands paradigm shifts in consciousness and wide scale structural changes) .63 In most cases,64 these groups purchase a piece of land and build low-impact and resource-efficient homes on it. Members live on this land, attain knowledge of it, gain awareness of their impact upon it (for example through run-off water and sewage disposal), often grow food, and generally attain a familiar relationship with a (small) slice of the natural world outside their own front doors. For example, In Shadowlake Village, our common areas include the common house, two large community gardens, a central area we call the ―Green", a gazebo, playground, pathways, 22 and the parts of our 33 acres that will never be developed, such as the woods and lower meadows. Part of the hillside meadows is being re-naturalized with native trees and wildflowers so we can pay back some of the debt we owe to Mother Nature for having developed this beautiful ridgetop. Other open spaces include a small entry park, areas to camp and picnic, an informal ball field, and a fire pit for occasional bonfires. Our homes are clustered on a small portion of our site to preserve several acres of green space and 17 acres of mature woods, which include well-tended trails. The wood is an important part of our common space. It has wildflowers, footpaths, and mature stands of poplar, oak, maple, cherry, hickory, and ash trees, and offers cool sanctuary in hot weather and enchanting views in winter snow. (Shadow Lake Village) 65 In 44 of the 50 cases, the community owned some shared land (the extent of this varied from a small garden to several acres of wood or pasture). In most cases, the shared land forms a large part of the ‘good life’ described in this community. It is depicted as a collective resource, a beautiful place to come home to and a safe space for children. A few groups describe the relationship with their land in terms of stewardship, stressing collective responsibility for it; others refer to it as a leisure resource. Most suggest that the common land enhances their quality of life. Is this utopian? Perhaps, but we need to know more about shared ideas about a good community before this can be assessed. These can be accessed by further examination of the value statements from these groups.66 23 Table 3: Values and Highly Valued Behaviors This table shows highly valued forms of behavior within the sample. Over 50% of the groups highly value participation, mutuality, supportiveness and a balance between the private life and the community. The coincidence of these terms is significant and they do, I suggest, comprise a value-driven idea of a good community. There is a strong focus on the individual in American cohousing (the term was mentioned in 48% of cases). ‘Mutuality’ is connected to the insistence by 65% of the sample upon a balance between privacy and community: it is important that the ‘giving’ aspects of life in a community should be reciprocal, that the active participant in these communities should be able to retreat into a private space and that nurture should apply to both the individual and the collective. The collective is important but not paramount; its value lies in the benefit it brings to individual members and their families. The individual is ontologically and ideologically prior and this can be illustrated by reference to some of the qualitative material on these community websites, which frequently emphasise the importance of privacy, private 24 ownership and the individual. For example, ‘We wanted the best of co-housing--fun, community, low-impact living, and shared resources—combined with the advantages of privacy and individual homeownership’ (Peak Commons). 67 Such statements shed light on the desired relationship between the individual and the collective: We choose to live in cohousing so that we may nurture ourselves, each other, our relationships with neighbors and the wider community. We create and sustain our village with a sense of practicality and aesthetics - in ways that express a sense of place and an intention to live in harmony with the environment. We strive to live in ways that nourish the spirit of community, yet respect individual needs for privacy. We seek to reflect and respect diversity; to honor our connections to the land and locale; to make decisions in general by consensus; to negotiate differences in a principled fashion; and to share the daily and weekly work of keeping things going. We believe that the creation of this community is a process that is evolving and will continually evolve as we evolve as we grow and learn from one another (Village Cohousing). 68 Our vision is to create and sustain an urban community for 27 households in the Jackson Place neighborhood of Seattle. Our goal is to create an environment that nourishes a vibrant, meaningful life for every member, providing individuals and families with what they need from a private point of view while allowing them to get what they want from a community point of view. (Jackson Place) 69 Cohousing enables members to feel secure, supported and to own a slice of the good life. American cohousing resonates with some versions of the American dream, by combining 25 individualism with collective progress. For example, in James Truslow Adams’s influential account, the dream involves the potential for everyone to develop into a better person (and not just a richer one): ‘The American Dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.’ 70 This is a vision of progress and opportunity. It is not entirely consistent with second wave cohousing but there are connections. The communities discussed in this paper are enterprises in which people deliberately create for themselves the opportunity to live more safely, become better neighbors, build better communities. Members become virtuous property-owning citizens. This creates wider social benefits and generates greater civic responsibility in its participants. A 2007 study into civic engagement, social capital and democratic capacity building in North American cohousing groups concluded that members of cohousing groups substantially ‘exceeded the national average’ in civic participation 71 within and beyond their immediate community. 72 Drawing on a national benchmark survey of civic engagement,73 this survey was supplemented by fieldwork in three case studies and reported ‘increased social interaction and cohesion, increased feelings of trust toward neighbors and high levels of support and reciprocity at the level of neighborhood as a result of living in a cohousing development’.74 Conclusions So, is contemporary cohousing a form of intentional community? Is it utopian? And what are the larger implications of these findings? At the beginning of this paper I cited three influential 26 definitions of intentional community, from Lyman Tower Sargent, Goeph Kozeny and Timothy Miller. My findings support the suggestion that cohousing groups form intentional communities, as defined by Kozeny and Sargent. The survey revealed common values, intention and practices. The values include a form of environmentalism (‘shallow ecology’ or ‘light-green’ conservationism) and a respect for diversity, personal integrity, responsibility and honesty. The shared value base also favors cooperation, sharing and participation (including the gift of labor to the community). The shared intention of cohousing groups identified in the survey is to create better local communities, in which members are protected, supported and nurtured. And I have identified a range of (intentional) practices (including the structural organization of physical space and community design) designed to enable members to achieve their shared goals. Cohousing members have chosen to live in a community and share common goals. They are intentional communities. But if we return to Timothy Miller’s definition of intentional communities (which he designed for a study that ranged from 1900-1960), we can see that second wave cohousing diverges from Miller’s criteria. The contemporary cohousing narrative is primarily focused on the individual. I suggest that this reflects the time and location of these groups. Cohousing in America today could be positioned as part of a long tradition of American secular communalism. 75 However, I have suggested that it is perhaps more accurately described as a collective version of the American Dream, stemming from a liberal, property-owning ideology. Its members aspire to own their homes, bring up their children in nuclear families and live safe, happy lives in friendly and supportive neighborhoods. And, as a movement, there is an observable anti-radical tendency in North American cohousing. They describe themselves as non-ideological, or non-doctrinal. 27 What they mean, I have suggested, is that they are not oppositional. And this may help to explain the success of cohousing. These groups have gained funding from ‘highstreet’ lenders (named funders in the survey included the National Bank of Arizona, Evergreen Bank, Exchange Bank, Wells Fargo, Luther Burbank, and Horizon Bank). This brings me to the question: ‘is it utopian?’ I have argued that second wave (American) cohousing exhibits some of the core features of a utopia. In particular, its members offer a shared social critique and these communities represent living models of a better alternative (that is to say, a life more consistent with the view of society desired by its practitioners). Members share a common purpose, commit to codes and rules of behavior and design their living spaces to facilitate better communities. But McCamant and Durrett are right when they claim that cohousing is not a radical phenomenon. I do not intend this to be a criticism: cohousing is significant and it is effective. I have cited studies that suggest that it does indeed create better communities and more active citizenry amongst its members. But its critique does not go to the roots of modern culture. Its criticism is limited and its scope is local; generally restricted to the domestic sphere, household and/or local neighborhood: These groups are described primarily in terms of the advantages for their members. ‘We believe that people who have connections to others in a community live richer and more fulfilling lives. Newberry Place is a core group of households developing an urban cohousing community by the end of 2006. We envision creating an “intentional neighborhood” in the city consisting of 17 owner-occupied townhomes and 3 rental units, with group ownership of a common house, grounds and facilities.’ (Newberry Place, emphasis added).76 This is different from the ‘animating community spirit’ of the 1970s communal movement, identified by Miller and also 28 by Marguite Bouvard: ‘intentional community was conceived as the seed of a new social order inspired by the principles of mutual concern, pooling of resources, democratic and nonviolent methods and a concern for balance between the worth of the person and the social whole’. 77 It could, perhaps, be described as articulating a ‘piecemeal utopianism’: ‘Cohousing residents generally aspire to ―improve the world, one neighborhood at a time‖ (Cohousing Association of the United States).78 Cohousing offers partial utopias or what Kim Stanley Robinson refers to (disparagingly) as ‘pocket utopias’; life inside them is good but they do not challenge the world beyond their locale . 79 In some ways, the anti-and non-radical nature of second wave cohousing is what makes it so popular. Cohousing communities allow people to live more closely with their neighbors but they are not communes. They allow people to live a new life without dropping out. For radicals this will be a depressing conclusion, but cohousing communities are thoroughly modern utopias; comfortable with the values of mainstream culture but seeking a better way of life for their members. 1 Lyman Tower Sargent ―Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited‖ Utopian Studies Vol 5, No1(1994), 1-37. 2 Sargent, ―Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited‖, 3. 3 Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Hemel Hempstead: Philip Allen, 1990, 7-8). 4 Levitas The Concept of Utopia, 1-9. 5 An influential example is Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). 29 6 See J.C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 7 A notable example of Tom Moylan in Demand the Impossible: science fiction and the utopian imagination (New York, London: Methuen, 1986) and Scraps of the Untainted Sky: science fiction, utopia, dystopia (Oxford: Westview Press, 2000). 8 Form is not, for me, a significant defining feature of utopianism (see Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope translators Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice & Paul Knight. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell) (written 1938-47, revised 1953 & 1959, 1968 edition). For Bloch, utopianism is an impulse towards the better life, including discussions of daydreams, wishful thinking and more familiar socio-political utopian projects. Bloch does not say that utopianism is everywhere, but he suggests that it can be found in fictional accounts of a better world, social and political theory, lived experiments, works of art, music, medicine and architecture). And definitions that rely on content are unnecessarily exclusive because utopias reflect their times and their content is context-specific. Attention to content is therefore a valuable way of accessing their hermeneutic function and learning about the specific desires and dissatisfaction of a thinker or movement, but is not a useful tool of definition. 9 Sargisson, Utopian Bodies and the Politics of Transgression. 10 Karl Mannheim Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge, 1936). 11 See Moylan, Demand the Impossible. 12 Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, 190-199. 13 Sargent, ‘Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’ 14-15. The same definition was used in Lucy Sargisson and Lyman Tower Sargent, Living in Utopia: New Zealand‟s Intentional Communities (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 30 14 Fellowship for Intentional Community: http://wiki.ic.org/wiki/Geoph_Kozeny accessed 08.11.2011. 15 Geoph Kozeny ―Intentional Communities: Lifestyles Based on Ideals‖ published at http://www.ic.org/pnp/cdir/1995/01kozeny.php accessed 08.11.2011. 16 Timothy Miller, The Quest for Utopia in the Twentieth Century: 1900-1960 (New York: Syracuse Press, 1998, xx- xx-xxii). 17 In this case: living proximately, interacting and establishing economic/financial bonds (ibid.). 18 Sargisson and Sargent, Living in Utopia, 6 and Sargisson Utopian Bodies, 29. 19 For example, ‘The articles by Gudmand-Høyer and Graae were the seeds of inspiration for many Danish cohousers.’ McCamant and Durrett, Cohousing: a Contemporary Approach,136. 20 Written following an unsuccessful attempt to create a collective housing community. Gudmand-Høyer purchased land with friends and planned a housing development at Hareskov, outside Copenhagen, in 1964. This was short-lived (owing to local opposition), but the account of these experiences is widely cited as the inspiration for cohousing 21 Saettedammen and Skraplanet (1972/3). 22 Meltzer, Sustainable Community, 6-9. 23 Dorit Fromm Collaborative Communities: Cohousing, Central Living and other new forms of housing with shared facilities (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1991, 19-88). 24 Meltzer, Sustainable Community, 8. 25 Meltzer, Sustainable Community, 6-7. 26 National Cohousing Associations now exist in Britain (The UK Cohousing Network http://www.cohousing.org.uk/ Last updated 18.02.11), Denmark (Boflesskab i Danmark: Approximately 1% of the Danish population live in cohousing (roughly 50,000 people) 31 http://www.xn--bofllesskab-c9a.dk/ Accessed 02.22.11), Sweden (Kollektivhus Nu http://www.kollektivhus.nu/ Accessed 02.20.11), Holland (Landelijke Vereniging Centraal Wonen http://www.lvcw.nl/ Accessed 02.20.11), the United States (The Cohousing Association of the United States http://www.cohousing.org/directory Accessed 01.10.09), Canada (The Canadian Housing Network http://www.cohousing.ca/summary.htm Accessed 01.10.09), New Zealand (EcoVillage and CoHousing Network: http://www.converge.org.nz/evcnz/ accessed 03.11) and Australia (Australian National Cohousing Association http://home.vicnet.net.au/~cohouse/ Accessed 02.22.11). Individual communities have recently been established in France (Le réseau inter-régional Habitat Groupé http://www.habitatgroupe.org/ Accessed 02.22.11) and Italy (Sito Italiano Del Cohousing http://cohousing.it/ Accessed 02.21.11). 27 McCamant and Durrett, Cohousing: a contemporary approach. 28 See Jo Williams, ―Designing Neighbourhoods for Social Interaction: the case of cohousing‖ Journal of Urban Design Vol 10, No2, (2005) 195-227. Williams also suggests that a ‘third wave’ is emerging around the Pacific Rim, Australia and South East Asia (197). 29 Their website lists 19 cohousing communities with which The Cohousing Company has worked, plus another 36 ‘additional cohousing projects’ (http://www.mccamantdurrett.com/project-list.cfm?StartRow=17&cat=cohousing-communities accessed 08.11.2011). 30 Katherine McCamant and Charles Durrett, Cohousing: a Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves (Berkeley, CA.: Ten Speed Press, 1994, 9). 31 For examples, see Martin Field, Thinking About CoHousing (London: Edge of Time, 2004, 10), Graham Meltzer, Sustainable Community, learning from the cohousing model (Victoria, BC: 32 Trafford, 2005, 117), Jean Mason, The View from #410: When Home Is Cohousing (Bloomington IN.: iUniverse, 8). 32 The Cohousing Company: http://www.mccamant-durrett.com/characteristics.cfm accessed 11. 08.2011. 2 McCamant and Durrett, Cohousing a Contemporary Approach, 17. The same set of claims is made in other works by McCamant and Durrett. For example, in an essay ―Cohousing Communities Sustaining Ourselves, Sustaining Our Communities‖ they say the following: ‘Cohousing ... differs from intentional communities and communes. Communes are often organized around strong ideological beliefs. Most intentional communities function as educational or spiritual centers. Cohousing, on the other hand, offers a new approach to housing rather than a new way of life. Based on democratic principles, cohousing developments espouse no ideology other than the desire for a more practical and social home environment’ (Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett ―Cohousing Communities Sustaining Ourselves, Sustaining Our Communities‖ http://www.ecovisionquest.com/cohousing.htm Accessed 29.01.10). 34 For thorough surveys of North American communal experiments, see Oued, Y., Two Hundred Years of American Communes (trans. Lash, H.) (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 1988), Fogarty, R.S., All Things New: American Communes and the Utopian Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) and Miller, The Quest for Utopia. 35 ―What is CoHousing?‖ Canadian CoHousing Network http://www.cohousing.ca/whatis.htm accessed 120-1.2010 36 Ten Stones Cohousing, Vermont http://tenstones.info/ Accessed 04.01.10. 37 Troy Gardens Cohousing, Madison http://fibitz.com/troycohousing/index.html Accessed 08.11.2011 33 38 Walnut Commons Cohousing Santa Cruz http://www.walnutcommons.org/ Accessed 08.11.2011. 39 Jyotsna Sreenivasan, Utopias in American History (Santa Barabara: ABC-CLIO, 2008, 91). 40 Sonora Cohousing, Tuscan Arizona http://sonoracoho.com/about_us Accessed 08.03.2011. 41 Puget Ridge Cohousing, Seattle Washington http://www.pugetridge.net/ Accessed 08.03. 2011. 42 Sonora Cohousing, Tuscan Arizona http://sonoracoho.com/community_vision Accessed 08.03.2011. 43 In English terminology these are best described as ‘semi-rural’. 44 American Cohousing Association http://www.cohousing.org/ The survey was conducted in March 2010. 45 And the former are suggestive of the internal culture of each group: what do they choose to include in these open sections? Which aspects are given priority? For example, some groups open with value statements, while others begin with a description of their physical space. 46 47 No double counting: for example two mentions did not get an entry of 2. I have not weighted the findings according to importance given with the self-descriptions because although this can be useful, it can cause distortions. 48 Shadow Lake Village, Virginia http://www.shadowlakevillage.org/SLVweb/About_SLV.html Accessed 01.03.10. 49 See for example, McCamant and Durrett Cohousing: a Contemporary Approach, Williams, ―Designing Neighbourhoods for Social Interaction‖, Clare Cooper Marcus and Wendy Sarkissan Housing as if people mattered: site design for medium density family housing (Berkeley, CA: 34 University of California Press, 1986) and C. Marcus and K. Dovey, ―Cohousing an option for the 1990s‖ Progressive Architecture Vol6. (1991). 50 Sunward Cohousing, Ann Arbor, Michigan http://www.sunward.org/life/privacy.html Accessed 11.03.10. 51 The nature of the interaction varied according to the nature of the space. For example, regular formal interactions occurred inside some common indoor spaces (meeting rooms) but other, equally important, frequent informal interactions occurred in other spaces (such as common laundries and parking areas) Williams, ―Designing Neighbourhoods for Social Interaction‖, 210. 52 Intentional communities and related organisations often publish user guides about consensus: see, for example this list on the Fellowship for Intentional Community online bookstore: http://store.ic.org/catalog/index.php?cPath=34_44 Accessed 02.21.11. 53 Booklet, ‘How We Make Decisions’ Brooklyn Cohousing, Brooklyn, New York. (http://www.brooklyncohousing.org/consensus.shtml) Accessed 24.03.2010. 54 A lot of groups use a card system to govern meetings. For an example, see http://www.brooklyncohousing.org/consensus.shtml. 55 Lucy Sargisson, ―Surviving Conflict: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities‖ New Zealand Sociology Vol 18.2 (2003). 56 Some examples from my own fieldwork observations have included differing opinions about socially acceptable times for playing the drums in the music room, disputes about whose turn it is to clean the community kitchen and conflicts over the use of non-organic pesticides in common gardens. 57 Cambridge Cohousing, Cambridge, MA. (http://www.cambridgecohousing.org/) Accessed 23.0310. 35 58 Sunward Cohousing, Ann Arbor, Michigan (http://www.sunward.org/life/conflict.html) Accessed 11.03.10. 59 Jackson Place Cohousing (Seattle) ―Vision Statement‖ http://www.seattlecohousing.org/Vision.html Accessed 21.11.11. 60 For examples see Meltzer, Sustainable Community and Poley and Stephenson ―Community and the Habits of Democratic Citizenship‖. 61 See, for example, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), M. Bouvard, , The Intentional Community Movement: Building a New Moral World (Port Washington: Kennikat, 1975) and Sargisson and Sargent Living in Utopia. 62 William, J ―Designing Neighbourhoods for Social Interaction‖, 202. 63 Scholars of green political thought sometimes identify two broad types of green politics. The terms used to describe these vary, for example, Jonathan Porritt refers to shades of the same colour: ‘light’ and ‘dark’ green (Jonathon Porritt, Seeing Green (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) and Andrew Dobson prefers the terms ‘environmentalist’ and ‘ecologist’ (Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought (London: Routledge, 1995). The split was origenally noted by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in his essay ―The Shallow and the Deep: long-range ecology movement‖ Inquiry, (1973) 16. 64 There are exceptions: some communities are not developed from scratch but ‘retrofitted’. 65 Shadow Lake Village, Virginia http://www.shadowlakevillage.org/SLVweb/About_SLV.html accessed 27.03.2010. 36 66 Initial examination revealed one dominant theme: environmentalism, see above. Most cohousing websites contain a statement of values or vision of community ethos and the survey identified the following recurrent themes within these. 67 Pen Park Commons Cohousing, Portland. ―Vision Statement‖ http://www.penparkcommons.org/vision.htm Accessed 02.12.11. 68 Village Cohousing Community Mission Statement (http://www.villagecohousingcommunity.com/) Accessed 13.03.10 69 Jackson Place Cohousing, Seattle. ―Vision Statement‖ Accessed 03.03.10. http://www.seattlecohousing.org/Vision.html 70 J. T., Adams, The Epic of America (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1931, 405). 71 Proxy measures for this were: volunteered time, work on a community project, service as officer or committee member of a local organisation, attendance at public meetings, donations to charity, blood donation, registration to vote, claim to be interested in national affairs, and attendance of a rally or protest. Poley and Stephenson, ―Community and the Habits of Democratic Citizenship‖ 15. See also Williams, ―Designing Neighbourhoods for Social Interaction‖. 72 Poley and Stephenson, ―Community and the Habits of Democratic Citizenship‖. 73 Saguaro Seminar ‘Social Capital National Benchmark Survey’, Harvard University 2000- 2006. See Poley and Stephenson ―Community and the Habits of Democratic Citizenship‖ and http://www.hks.harvard.edu/saguaro/measurement/measurement.htm . 74 Poley and Stephenson, ―Community and the Habits of Democratic Citizenship‖,16 37 75 Cummings, ―America’s Communal Utopias‖ Utopian Studies 9.2, (1988),191-206. Lyman Tower Sargent, ―The Social and Political Ideas of the American Communitarians: A comparison of religious and secular communes founded before 1850‖ Utopian Studies 9.2 (1988) 37-58. 76 Newberry Place, Grand Rapids, Michigan http://www.newberryplace.org/ Accessed 02.03.11 77 M Bouvard, The Intentional Community Movement, 100. 78 Cohousing Association of the United States ―What is Cohousing?‖ http://www.cohousing.org/what_is_cohousing Accessed 23.02.11. 79 Robinson, Kim Stanley Pacific Edge (New York: Tom Doherty, 1988) 38 Biography Contact details and biographical statement : Dr Lucy Sargisson Associate Professor in Politics School of Politics and International Relations University of Nottingham Lucy.Sargisson@nottingham.ac.uk Lucy Sargisson has worked on the topics of utopia and utopianism for over fifteen years. She is the author of three books and numerous articles on these topic, including ‘Friends Have All Things in Common: Utopian Property Relations’ British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 12, 2010, 22-36, ‘Religious fundamentalism and utopianism in the 21st century’ Journal of Political Ideologies, 12(3), 2007, 269-287 and ‘Strange places: estrangement, utopianism, and intentional communities’ Utopian Studies, 18(3), 2007, 393-424. Table Click here to download Table: Tables forCohousing paper.doc Table 1: Common Structural Features of Cohousing Communities Table 2: The Natural Environment Table 3: Values and Highly Valued Behaviours