Cohousing

Cohousing is an intentional,[1] self-governing,[2] cooperative community where residents live in private homes often clustered around shared space.

Neighbors collaboratively plan and manage community activities and shared spaces while maintaining their own income and private lives.

[8] To promote the common good, cohousing members regularly share meals, attend meetings, and participate in community work days.

[9] As part of cohousing's social nature, neighbors gather for parties, games, gardening, musical performances, movies, sports, and celebrations.

Living in cohousing makes it easy for residents to form clubs, organize child and elder care, share information, free cycle and carpool.

Based on active participation by residents,[14] Cohousing communities are usually structured – in principle and often in architecture – to encourage interactions[15] and the formation of rich relationships among their members.

So as to promote an interdependent village-like[17] 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.

Although all cohousing communities are intentional[22]—including many ecovillages[1][23] (such as Sawyer Hill in Massachusetts and Los Angeles Ecovillage in California)--the broader term of intentional communities encompasses alternative forms of living, ranging from communes to ashrams to monasteries which aren't always managed collaboratively and don't necessarily include the privacy and individual living space of cohousing.

In the 1920s in New York, the rise of cooperative apartment housing, which now make up over 70% of all homes in Manhattan, similarly incorporate shared facilities, self government and greater social interaction but rarely include prospective residents participation in the design process nor the intentionality of current cohousing.

Swedish social scientists and architects advanced common space coupled with private homes, followed by the modernists in the 1930's-'50's who spurred the building of many cohousing communities,[27] such as Marieberg[28] in Stockholm.

Distinct from communal living experiments associated with the hippie movement,[15] the modern application of cohousing developed in Denmark in the 1960s among groups of families who were dissatisfied with existing housing and communities that they felt did not meet their needs, particularly in respect to work-life balance.

[29] Bodil Graae wrote a newspaper article titled "Children Should Have One Hundred Parents",[30] spurring a group of 50 families to organize around a community project in 1967.

The key organizer was Jan Gudmand Høyer who drew inspiration from his architectural studies at Harvard and interaction with experimental U.S. communities of the era.

Self-governing cohousing communities, such as Sharingwood in Washington, N Street in California, Ecovillage at Ithaca and Cantines Island both in New York were built in the '80's and '90's with cooperatively owned space and a social structure that encourages supportive interactions, balanced with privately owned homes, as collaborative alternatives to typical American subdivisions.

Condo ownership is most common because it fits many financial institutions' and cities' models for multi-unit owner-occupied housing development.

In Australia, due to higher legal complexity of cooperatives, cohousing projects are most commonly developed under limited proprietary company with cooperative-like rules.

In Europe the term "joint building ventures" has been coined to define the form of ownership and housing characterized as cohousing.