Principles of co-housing
Environmental Sustainability
Domestic homes consume huge amounts of energy relative to transport and industry. A large proportion of this energy can be eliminated by very cheap means. Consideration of energy consumption at the stage of house-design offers even more scope for reductions.
Houses can be designed to collect as much as solar energy as possible whilst losing as little heat as possible just by putting large areas of low-emissivity glass on south-facing walls and smaller windows on north-facing walls. Installing insulation at the time of construction is much cheaper than insulating existing buildings. Temperature fluctuations from day to night or even from summer to winter can be evened out by incorporating high-thermal mass. This can be done using large amounts of stone, earth or concrete in the construction incorporating large reservoirs of water inside the house or building houses into deep banks of earth.
For a co-housing community there are also opportunities to "club together" and supply heat centrally via a district heating scheme which generates heat and electricity at optimum efficiency using a combined heat and power (CHP) plant. The cost of buying and installing solar water-heating systems, solar electric systems, wind turbines or heat pumps can be reduced by ordering materials in bulk and putting the same systems onto many people's homes.
Technologies available for making more efficient use of water, such as; low-flush loos, rainwater harvesting and grey-water recycling, can also become more affordable when implemented on a large scale. Compost loos could also be incorporated into house designs. More sustainable methods for treating waste-water are also available for groups of homes which would be very difficult to implement for individuals. Reed-bed sewage-treatment can result in water which is cleaner than the river into which it is poured, this could also be recycled for grey-water applications we aim to do this if space and water levels permit.
Car-pooling can be difficult to organise, especially if members of the scheme are too geographically dispersed. A car-pool in a co-housing community could drastically reduced the need for car ownership, whilst offering more choice about the kind of transport available. And because of the proximity of friends, workshops, open-space, community-organised entertainment and the bulk delivery of food and other essentials, the need for transport would be less. An organised community could also lobby more effectively for improvements in public transport, cycle routes and pedestrian access to other parts of the city.