Cohousing evolves into “ecovillages”
“We need to take neighborhoods seriously, as a critical component of a well-rounded life experience,” Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett write in the afterword of their newly updated book, Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities.
McCamant and Durrett, architects based in Nevada City, California, have designed and developed more than 50 cohousing communities across the US, including Frogsong, a development in Cotati, California, that was featured in the June 2005 New Urban News. In the third edition of Creating Cohousing, from New Society Publishers (336 pp., $32.95 paperback), they explain how cohousing communities make more sustainable lifestyles possible.
“In 2008, Americans drove 2.9 trillion miles to playdates, soccer games, music lessons, and social events of all sorts, as well as driving to work and shop,” McCamant and Durrett point out. In cohousing, where residents share dining facilities, gardens, recreation space, and other amenities, “kids still have soccer practice and people still need to get to work, but they carpool with neighbors and friends. They live in a more village-like setting where it is easy, even natural, to conserve resources.”
The book, updated for the first time since 1994, covers the experience of building several dozen projects in recent years and explains how cohousing has evolved. The authors tell how to guide projects through planning departments, marketing, financing, and other parts of the development process.
The US now has 120 cohousing communities. In its latest incarnation, the cohousing model has served as “a potential building block for several proposed ecovillages in Maine, Los Angeles, British Columbia, and other locations,” the authors report. “Based on a successful European model, these villages incorporate ecologically sound technology and green building and agricultural practices into almost self-supporting small town-like environments.”
In projects like Belfast Ecovillage in Belfast, Maine, McCamant and Durrett say they have worked on site designs that allow villagers to grow and sell food locally, meet their shopping needs by walking rather than driving, and socialize in a neighborhood-wide center — “our chance to re-establish the small town-like square.”
