Between alienation and claustrophobia?

• Author: Jordan, Lindsay Hower
• Position: Book Review

Sustainable Community: Learning From the Cohousing Model

Graham Meltzer, Ph.D. (Victoria, British Columbia: Trafford Publishing, 2005), 189 pp.

The global consumer class is steadily expanding around the globe, and with it so is the consumer culture, in which technology more and more substitutes for community. People are watching more TV, commuting alone to work, and buying larger houses, increasingly distancing themselves from their neighbors. So Graham Meltzer's book, Sustainable Community: Learning From the Cohousing Model--which asserts that residents of cohousing communities with small houses and shared common spaces are generally happier--is timely. The global trend toward rampant individualism causes one to wonder how individuals living closer to their neighbors in a less individualistic and more group-oriented way can choose such a lifestyle and actually thrive on it.

Cohousing communities are residential models rooted in a voluntary commitment to group priorities, goals, and concerns, expressed in a variety of ways, from scheduled communal meals to coordinated trips to the grocery store. Usually arranged in one of four generic neighborhood layouts, these communities share certain facilities--kitchens, recreation areas, gardens, driveways--as well as a collective sense of ownership of the living community. Characterized by a spirit of sharing (garden and power tools, cars, cooking utensils), cohousing communities are much more than just tight neighborhoods; they often resemble extended families.

Sustainable Community begins with a colorful overview of the history of cohousing and catalogs Meltzer's observations of 12 cohousing communities in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Japan. Meltzer identifies six defining characteristics of cohousing models: participatory process, neighborhood design, common facilities, self-management, absence of hierarchy, and separate incomes. He also highlights the strengths of each community as well as the lessons learned as each has grown and developed.

Meltzer emphasizes a few common threads running through the 12 case studies that distinguish cohousing models from individual family-based housing communities: greater social cohesion and support, stronger inclination to treat neighbors like family, and more environmentally sustainable lifestyles (because of their smaller household units, shared gray-water systems, organic community and individual gardens, renewable energy use, reduced...