The idea for collaborative housing began in the 1960s when a group of friends began talking about their living situation and realized they shared similar problems. Most were too busy working to have much time to spend with their friends, and when they came home from work, their time was taken up with cooking, cleaning, and washing. Their children spent too much time watching TV, often because no other children their age lived in the neighborhood. The kind of housing these people could afford was either isolated in suburbia or too dense and urban. They felt there had to be a better way. When they talked about the kind of place they would like to live in—good housing, lots of trees, a big playground, and many amenities all in a safe neighborhood—they realized the benefits they could gain by developing housing together.
In collaborative housing, each household has its own house or apartment and one share in the common facilities, which typically include a fully equipped kitchen, play areas, and meeting rooms. Residents share cooking, cleaning, and gardening on a rotating basis. By working together and combining their resources, collaborative housing residents can
have the advantages of a private home and the convenience of shared services and amenities.
Many residents I interviewed believe that the greatest strength of this form of housing is that it creates not only a home but a small community as they actively participate in its development and management.
Ssettedammen, built in 1972, was the first collaborative development. This Danish variety has row houses, with common facilities in a separate common house. Fifty-four adults, and almost as many children, were both excited and apprehensive when they moved in. "We didn't know what to expect . . . whether all our ideas and hopes would work," said one resident. Another cohousing development, Skraplanet, soon followed. Departing from the detached single-family home, the residents in these two communities pioneered new ideas of living collaboratively. Their methods influenced the many communities that have since followed.
All the elements of collaborative housing can be seen in Sasttedammen:1
• Common facilities
• Private dwellings
• Resident management
• Design for social contact
• Resident participation in the development process
• Pragmatic social objectives
COMMON FACILITIES
Most of the shared facilities in Sasttedammen are centrally located in the common house and used daily. Here evening meals are prepared and eaten, films are shown at night, children are watched in the afternoon, and coffee is shared on Sunday mornings.
The Saettedammen residents found that possibilities arose for shared use of facilities and services among twenty-seven families-laundry room, a sauna, play areas, parking, and a central heating facility that provides heat at reduced cost.
In order to afford to build the common facilities, the floor area of each residence was reduced slightly, by 7%. The cost savings of this reduced floor area was "donated" toward the construction of the common house. "I admit we were cautious. We weren't sure how it would work out—how much we would do in common and how much would be done in the family, so we built a common house, and, just in case, houses so big we could function alone," explained a resident.
In the years since, other communities have realized that many everyday activities can be done in common, and the amount of donated floor space has averaged 10-15%, with common houses typically larger than that at Saettedammen. They include spaces that are not readily found in affordable housing today: saunas, darkrooms, soundproof music rooms, a hangout for teenagers, business rooms with computers and photocopiers, tennis courts and swimming pools, gyms, guest rooms, and cafes. By residents' pooling resources, spaces that are usually found only in the public or commercial realm are affordable and made semiprivate.
PRIVATE DWELLINGS
The private dwelling in Saettedammen reflects a new duality; it sustains the household and permits the creation of common areas. Each dwelling contains a kitchen, living-dining room, and one or more bedrooms and baths, but the layout of the home is reshuffled to reflect community priorities. The kitchen and dining areas are moved to the front of the dwelling and visually connected to the common areas. Residents can work in their kitchens and see who is passing by or keep an eye on young children playing in the commons. Bedrooms and the living room are oriented toward the back of the house for privacy.
Saettedammen's row houses rival suburban single-family houses in spaciousness, with 1,500-2,422 square feet (140-225 square meters). More recent communities, such as Andedammen, have dwellings ranging from 538 square feet to 1,313 square feet (50-122 square meters).2 Recent cohousing dwellings are smaller than in the past because of rising housing costs and residents' preference for larger common houses. The largest space reductions have occurred in the kitchen, dining room, and living room because the common facilities have taken over some of those functions. The kitchen is shorn of large refrigerators, bulky freezers, surplus storage, and sometimes several stove burners as well. The washer and dryer, as well as storage, move out of the private and into the common sphere. The living room is smaller because common meeting space is available. The snipping away of private area continues: the workshop in the garage, the hobby room, the playroom, the den or TV room, the guest room, the library—every cohousing community has some of these rooms as part of the common amenities, and a large number have almost all of them.
The individual dwellings and the common amenities have a symbiotic relationship. So that the common spaces may exist, the dwellings give up some space and are redesigned smaller and tighter. The dwellings, in turn. owe their increased utility to the common spaces because they are too small to function well alone.
RESIDENT-STRUCTURED ROUTINES
The essence of collaborative housing is that community is created by meeting everyday needs in a communal way. The most straightforward and utilitarian chores—cooking, watching children, sweeping the walkway—provide the opportunity to meet neighbors, talk, and develop relationships.
Preparation of shared evening meals at the common house is a routine that saves each household shopping, cooking, and cleaning for its own supper. "It's perfect, especially when you have come home from a long day of work," said one resident, "and when 1 don't feel like going [to the common house], I just take the food home."
The meals are inexpensive ($2-3 per adult), with a great variety of cooking styles and food. Common dining is normally voluntary, but cooking, about once a month, often a requirement. There are three basic ways
that residents organize common dining: the dinner club, where three to four households rotate dining at each other's house (say, every Sunday one family will cook and clean for two or three others); eating groups, where different groups of about six to ten households dine at the common house, with one household preparing the meal; and a residential cooking crew that prepares dinner for all the households to eat together at the common house from one to five times a week.
Sharing evening meals began as a social activity and has moved toward greater task cooperation.3 The Saettedammen residents had intended from the beginning to share some evening meals, and they organized by dividing themselves into small eating groups. There is a Monday, a Tuesday, a Wednesday, and a Thursday eating group and a gourmet group on Sundays. Typically people sign up to eat communally once or twice a week. No money is exchanged. Some residents may be able to afford to cook fancier meals, and this is accepted. In Skraplanet, a cohousing community built in 1973, the common meal is also organized among eating groups. Each group has six families who eat together about once a week and rotate cooking among them-selves. To reduce cleaning up, each family brings its own dishes to the common house and takes them back home to wash.
The following generations of cohousing have larger common houses, where the whole community can eat. In Jystrup Sav-vaerket (1985), common evening meals are available for all households six nights a week, and residents choose the days they would like to eat.4 The food preparation is organized around cooking crews (half a dozen adults and several children per crew) that cook one week in seven. In this community, money is collected from all who eat and distributed to those who shopped.
Although some residents prefer to prepare their own meals, they can participate in the community in other ways, for example, by serving on committees that oversee maintenance, gardening, child care, or other tasks.
RESIDENT MANAGEMENT
Management responsibility is shared among the residents. The group decides on rules and policies to govern the community and criteria for new members. Although some communities have a board of directors, its decision-making power is limited to bookkeeping and organizational and secretarial tasks. All major decisions are made by the entire community of residents.
Seettedammen residents meet monthly to decide issues through a process of direct democracy and mutual agreements. Making decisions together was at first difficult; now the process is well organized:
At first we felt that everyone should discuss everything, and it took hours and hours and hours. After a while we discovered that one or two people could research it, and if they have a suggestion, we follow it. We now have another attitude toward the democracy, of having a high degree of confidence in the group.
This same sort of organization can be found in collaborative communities developed as nonprofit rentals, such as Hilver-
sumse Meent in Holland. The tenants there have much more influence than is traditionally granted to renters. Their management and maintenance work (with the cooperation from the housing agency) result in cost savings for them, as well as a greater satisfaction with the housing.
Disagreements among residents usually are resolved within the community rather than by lawyer, managing company, or housing authority. Residents understand their responsibility in dealing with problems.
DESIGN FOR SOCIAL CONTACT
The emphasis on community transcends sharing common facilities and management. The layout of the development is designed to bring residents in daily contact with one another. The social contact emphasized in the design includes contact between individual residents, between residents and the cohousing community, and between the cohousing community and the public.
Residents are brought into contact with other residents in many subtle ways. Sastte-dammen residents must park their cars at the periphery of the site. Walking to their homes, they have a chance to stop and chat with other residents. The car-free interior area allows children to play and visit the homes of neighboring friends on their own.
The design of the housing encourages a flow from the private spaces to the semipri-vate porch and front yard, These soft edges are another important design feature that allow residents a place to sit, stand, or work and still be connected to common activities going on around them (Gehl).
Residents are also brought into contact with the cohousing community through the use of the common house and outdoor areas. These common areas are centrally located so that residents can walk by and easily see what is going on. In Ssettedammen. residents pass by the common areas on their way in and out of the development, which allows them to see if any events are going on without having to commit themselves or make a special trip.
The social contact between the community and the public varies among developments. Some residents do not want the public walking freely in and out of their common areas, but neither do they want to isolate themselves from the public. Danish cohousing tends to be introverted, and many of the older communities turned their back on the neighborhood around them. Now there are developments that share a play field, parking areas, or common facilities such as child care with the surrounding community. Sasttedammen does not present a public front to the street; instead the entrance to the parking lot greets passing pedestrians. The more recent cohousing community of Kilen (1989) manages both to create a tight community and orient itself toward the surrounding neighborhood. Kilen dwellings face each other along an enclosed covered street. At one end, the community shares a parking area with other housing, and the other end of the street, where the common house is located, opens out to a public plaza.
Designs that emphasize gradual transitions among private, common, and public areas increase social opportunities (McCamant and Durrett). They also make it easy to carry out tasks in private and common areas simultaneously, such as working in the kitchen and watching several children or working around the house and keeping an eye on the common areas. Although social contact is emphasized, residents can find privacy in their own dwelling and back yard.
RESIDENT PARTICIPATION IN THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
Groups developing a cohousing community take an active role in its design. Cohousing is never generic; each community is tailored to a specific group's requirements. The development process is often difficult and includes organizing a core group, finding land, hiring architects, and obtaining financing. Certain stages are repeated in almost every development process.
Step 1. The idea is formulated, and a core group is formed. The idea for the first cohousing community began in 1964 when architect Jan Gudmand-H0yer and a group of friends met to discuss their housing options. Unhappy with living in the city or isolated in suburban one-family houses that "destroy the landscape and the soul,", they agreed it was best to live close to each other in housing designed with their needs in mind (Gudmand-H0yer). This group of friends began to meet regularly.
Interest in the idea grew, and others started to talk and write about this new possibility for community. A few years after Gudmand-H0yer's group began, author Bodil Graae's article, "Children Should Have One Hundred Parents" (1967), emphasized building community with children. More than fifty people responded to the article, and a group formed to pursue such a community.
Step 2. Goals arc agreed upon. Gud-mand-H0yer and his friends wanted to create a community where there would be a "big supply of friends," the possibility of child care, common parking, and common activities. The site should be near the city but provide enough open area for children to play. Graae's group focused on a community where the adults would take care of all the children and where children could move freely and be welcome at any of the homes.
Step 3. Land is obtained. Once the basic goals were decided, the search for a site began. In 1964, Gudmand-Heyer's group had purchased land in an older residential neighborhood, but strong opposition from the neighbors eventually led the group to sell out. Frustrated and disappointed, a number of families left the group.5 In 1968, Gudmand-H0yer, Graae, and a number of interested people joined together and found a site in a small village near Copenhagen. But once the site was chosen, a falling out occurred. Ideological questions as well as site preferences caused some members to form a new group, which eventually became the Sasttedammen development.
This second group of five families, influenced by Graae, located a site and advertised for participants. Specific goals were agreed upon and tasks divided among small committees: contractual issues, child care, financing, and common facilities. Meetings were held four times a month, and a newsletter, published every two weeks, kept members up to date.
Step 4. Architectural plans are completed. The two groups worked alongside each other, exchanging ideas and information. The Sasttedammen group hired architects who worked with them to design the community. Architects Teo Bjerg and Palle Dyreborg attended meetings, presented sketches, budgets, and proposals, and met with individual families regarding their dwellings.
Step 5. Contractors bid on the plans, and the housing is built. In the Sasttedam-men group, construction bids were received for the completed plans in 1970 but were too expensive. Amid accusations and recriminations, the original design was thrown out, and a more affordable solution was sought. A small committee then researched five possibilities, and in the spring of 1971, the whole group voted on one of these projects. In October 1972, twenty-seven families moved into Sasttedammen.
The group led by Gudmand-H0yer was still grappling with high construction bids. But cutbacks in the design allowed construction to begin in 1972, and a year later thirty-three families moved into Skraplanet.
Over the past fifteen years, the initiation of and participation in the development have varied. In Saettedammen, the initiative was taken by the residents who own the housing under condominium ownership. In later communities, the initiative has also been taken by nonprofit housing organizations and government housing authorities. In both scenarios, the future residents retain a high degree of control. In the process, the traditional role of the resident has expanded, with the architect's role adapting to accommodate a multi-
headed client. The result is not necessarily a new type of architecture but is a better fit.
PRAGMATIC SOCIAL OBJECTIVES
Although cohousing has been strongly influenced by the collective movement of the 1960s and 1970s when many experimentations with new ways of living together were tried, there are strong differences between the two. Members of collectives and intentional communities often see themselves as building a new society and new forms of family (McLaughlin). Cohousing residents wish to live within the existing society, with the privacy and autonomy of the household secure. Their intention is to strengthen the family by creating supportive social networks, and by sharing certain daily tasks.
Like a traditional neighborhood, Sastte-dammen residents may share many values but are not united by a single ideology. As they do in most other collaborative communities, residents avoid heated political and religious discussions; when they do occur, it is clear that residents have various and strong opinions.
We've had sharp political discussions, and it's absolutely obvious we don't agree. I remember three years after we moved in, someone started a committee to send humanitarian aid to the Third World. Others said, "This is rubbish; you should send machine guns. It's the only way they will improve their situation." We had quite a sharp clash.
When there are so many worthwhile causes, why does the community—having accomplished so much in developing itself— not organize to deal with more? In part, it is because their original intention remains unchanged: to create a home and community that they can control, with problems they can solve, and issues on which they can reach consensus. Without straying into religion or politics, there are many pragmatic issues on which residents do not agree: how to raise children, cleanliness, additions to the common house, and even songs sung at St. Hans Day, a Scandinavian midsummer festival.
Finding solutions with which all residents can live is the challenge and delight of cohousing. As Ssettedammen resident Ole Svensson explained, "When we sit together and drink enough beer, we are all equal."
NOTES
1. There is no agreement among Denmark, Holland, and Sweden on an English term for their separate, and distinct, collective developments. Danish researchers, as well as Americans writing about bofsellesskaber. translate the term as cohousing (McCamant and Dur-rett). The Dutch centraal wonen is referred to in English as simply centraal wonen (Backus). The Swedish kollektivhus has been loosely translated as collective housing (Woodward). The reason is that this housing type sprang up more or less independently in each country. Therefore the type of building (low rise in Denmark, towers in Sweden), the way it is developed (planned by residents in Denmark, and usually planned by local authorities in Sweden), and the ownership (mostly co-ops and home ownership in Denmark, mostly
rentals in Sweden) vary among these three countries. Since these are all essentially similar types of developments and share these seven similar elements, I refer to all of them as collaborative housing.
Europeans also have not agreed on the exact differences among cohousing. centraal wonen, and kollektivhus. Danish researcher Hans Skifter Andersen finds important differences between the Danish bofsellesskaber and the Swedish kollektivhus. in that kollektivhus are planned by local authorities (Andersen). Within Sweden, kollektivhus is used to describe both housing developed and owned entirely by residents (such as Slottet in Lund) and that owned by housing authorities (such as Slacken in Gothenburg). The Swedes see the main difference between them and the Danes as not one of ownership but building type. The Dutch, who have developments of all these types, do not make such distinctions. The Dutch organization for centraal wonen, Landelijke Vereniging Centraal Wonen, considers both resident- and government-owned housing, row house and apartment, with common rooms or a separate common house, variations of one housing type (Krabbe). In truth, if a comparison were made of the cohousing development of Drejerbanken in Denmark, the centraal wonen development of de Meenthe in Holland, and the kollektiuhuset Rainbow in Sweden, few differences would be found. I am following the Dutch example of including various ownerships, location of common facilities, and densities under the umbrella of collaborative housing. To complicate matters, countries such as Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria (Brech, Bernfeld. Freisitzer, M.H.G.A., Reinig) also have housing that could be described as collaborative except that residents do not usually share meals. If they meet the seven criteria mentioned and have some form of common meal at least once a month, I include them in the collaborative category.
2. A typical American studio apartment is about 650 square feet and a two-bedroom house about 1,200 square feet.
3. The early communities such as Saettedammen were not built with the idea of organizing tasks efficiently. They were seen as an alternative to the isolation of single-family homes and a way of sharing amenities. As the group members became well acquainted with each other, they began to realize this new possibility. More routines have been organized to be accomplished cooperatively (Andersen).
4. Residents are required to pay a minimum of 350 kroner ($48), or the equivalent of two-thirds of the cost of the monthly meals. They can choose not to pay for eleven evening meals.
5. The first cohousing groups in Denmark had a more difficult time in development, while subsequent groups have benefitted from the insights and mistakes of the first groups and from the wider acceptance of this housing form. The evolution of cohousing can be found in the writings of Gudmand-H0yer, Kjaersdam, McCamant and Durrett, Carter |
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