Principles of co-housing
Social Sustainability
One of the fundamental strengths of a co-housing community is the active participation of the future residents joining together to design their future homes and community facilities. Members actively participate from the earliest planning stages through to construction and completion. So the project directly responds to their needs.
By going through the planning, design and decision making process together, the future residents start building a community long before the physical construction starts.
The opportunity is available for the community to share responsibility for the care and support of children, sick, less able or elderly people. Extended families can be great when children are growing up or when family members get increasingly frail or vulnerable through old-age. However, there can also be friction between relatives. Nowadays, the day-to-day support from families is often not there because of geographical separation. This is often the reason older people end up in residential care homes. Co-Housing offers a community into which members opt freely rather than being born into. Through living in a community of people of diverse backgrounds and all ages, people can get some of the support they might have had from their families before we became as mobile as we now are.
The possibilities are endless for small groups or the community as a whole. Common areas can be made available for music rooms, sports facilities, woodland, wildlife study. Group holidays are possible as are shared ownership of ponies, boats, caravans and other expensive items. The shared facilities provide for practical and social benefit for instance a shared workshop replaces the need for every household to have space and tools to fix furniture and bikes. In co-housing we can re-examine what should remain private and what can be shared in common with a group of known and trusted neighbours wasteful duplication is avoided from lawnmowers to washing machines.
The communal kitchen and dining room allows the community to have optional shared evening meals which have proven to be a success in co-housing. Many exsisting residents believe that they are the glue that holds communities together. Eating communally is always voluntary, no resident has to participate, yet today most co-housing communities plan regular meals with about half the residents participating on any given evening. Those who participate will take turns in cooking the communal meal, whether singly or with another household, or pot-luck parties are often successful.
Children
The opportunity to grow up in a community in which a child can walk freely without fear of cars or strangers is invaluable. The availability of open-spaces and shared play-areas are important. Unlike many in Bristol, children in a co-housing community can make their own choices about where to go, whom to see and what to do.
Even in a big city like Bristol, home-education is hard to organise and usually involves frequent journeys across the city. The proxmity of families and the availability of facillities for meeting and playing will greatly reduce the logistical difficulties for those parents who choose to home-educate their children.
Food
The purchasing power of a co-housing community may help to make buying local, organic produce more affordable to members of the community and provide a more stable market for producers. Bulk-buying fair-trade goods would also be attractive.
It may be possible that the presence of the co-housing community allows local shops to remain trading where they would otherwise have been forced to close through competition from warehouse superstores.
With access to common land and the need for less of private space, more food could be grown in the community. The produce could be traded internally and externally depending on the expertise and energy of those involved.