Janda_Thesis_Final.docx

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Claire Janda

Honors Thesis in Urban Studies and Planning (Department of Interdisciplinary Studies) University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Advisor: Dr. Andrew Whittemore

Second Reader: Dr. Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld Defended: April 8, 2020

Affiliation: Department of City and Regional Planning Award: Highest Honors

**This project was supported by the Kimball King Undergraduate Research Fund administered by Honors Carolina.**

Beyond ‘Borrowing an Egg’: Opportunities and Obstacles in Modern

Utopian Community Design

I conceive that land belongs for use to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless members are still unborn.

- Nana Sir Ofori Atta I, as cited in A Pattern Language

There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,

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Abstract: This thesis reports results from a study of the physical design elements of six intentional communities in the United States. The study uses both observational and

informational interview data to examine the relationship between design and community life. It finds that certain design elements (private space, informal socializing, and gathering nodes) are found across all six, but that the quality of life and longevity of the communities are more dependent on non-design external factors (particularly the interaction between vetting and recruitment and initial motivation for establishment) than physical design elements.

Key Words: intentional communities, urban communal living, cohousing, utopian communities, urban design, urban planning, neighborhood design, utopian socialism, gathering nodes,

behavioral psychology

PREFACE

My intention is for this thesis to include principles and approaches from the fields of urban planning and design, sociology, anthropology, and psychology in other to better understand the extent to which physical design plays a role in the daily function and longevity of intentional community life, and whether there are external factors to consider.

In addition, I acknowledge the multitude of intentional communities (past and present). The history of these spaces, particularly in the US, is a rich and compelling one. As much as I would like to delve into the unusual proclivities of 19th_{century American religious separatists, I}

will focus on a few key examples of intentional communities as they relate to design and planning.

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INTRODUCTION

In 2018, the global population living in urban areas reached 55%. The UN projects that it will reach 68% by 2050, and today, 82% of North Americans live in cities1_{. But what is life like}

for those who inhabit these urban areas? The British NIH published research in 2015 declaring loneliness a “public health emergency,”2_{and in recent years, headlines from publications such as}

the New York Times tout American cities as “unlivable” 3_{and “miserable.”}4_Contemporary

planners and designers reference “new urbanism” as a movement towards facilitating community interaction and engagement,5_{but as Robert Putnam’s classic “Bowling Alone” details, we are}

facing a profound decline in civic engagement in American society. Membership in national association chapters and unions, volunteering and charitable donations, and even basic social visiting have all seen a steep drop-off since the mid-1960s.6

In addition to exhibiting signs of decreased sociability, city life in the US can be cost-prohibitive and crowded—especially on the coasts. Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens all rank in the top 20 most expensive housing markets in the US, along with San Francisco and Oakland. Brooklyn’s cost of living is 81.7% above the US average, and Manhattan’s is 148.5%. All five boroughs of New York City contain roughly 8.4 million people over 319 square miles with about 531 square feet per person; the average New Yorker pays $1,300 more per month for a

two-1_{United Nations DESA, 2018} 2_{PubMed, 2015}

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bedroom apartment than the average American does7_{. In San Francisco, average rent is 3.5 times}

the national average, and the general cost of living is 96.3% above average. The nine counties that comprise the San Francisco Bay Area contain about 7.8 million people over 7,000 square miles with about 800,000 in San Francisco proper.8_{Affordable housing has grown increasingly}

difficult to come by in the area, with the smallest legal apartment taking up only 160 square feet.9

These statistics bring to mind a few adjectives that city and non-city dwellers alike use to describe the urban lifestyle: crowded, isolating, and expensive. If the job market continues to push Americans (and the world) towards an urban residence, these challenges will need to be addressed sooner or later. This situation begs the question, “why does city life appear to be so unpleasant?” Are these qualities—dense, antisocial, and costly—a temporary complication of an urban boom, or will they continue to worsen? How can urbanists, city dwellers, planners, architects, and government agencies create designs, lifestyles, and policies that improve daily life for city residents? This is not a question that we will resolve easily. One response that directly confronts these aspects of social isolation, density, and expense in modern urban life, however, is the phenomenon of the “intentional community” (or IC).

Intentional communities are not an inherently radical phenomenon. The idea of building community through housing and neighborhood design is present in many situations that the average person is familiar with, ranging from student cooperative housing to amenity-rich gated communities. Many living arrangements are characterized by shared facilities for cooking, laundry, recreation, and so on, and sharing often involves setting ground rules and expectations for communal use. Although this process is not always conscious of its community-building potential, it mimics the life of intentional communities on a smaller scale.

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For the purposes of this study, however, I use the term “intentional communities” to refer to the conscious creation of a living arrangement for five or more adults who rely upon mutual aid and collective responsibility to achieve a shared vision of community-building.10_Intentional

communities, or ICs, may form for different reasons (most frequently, members share specific political, religious, sexual, ecological, or lifestyle-based ideologies). The most extreme of these motivations are often the subject of scrutiny in media, film, and literature, as there is a certain morbid interest in the life of communes, especially those seen as religious or political cults by outsiders. However, while all communes are ICs, not all ICs are communes, since not all ICs have a specific separatist motivation. ICs are usually found in rural or suburban areas, but they do exist in dense urban areas, where they often manifest in the sub-type of urban cohousing.

This study asks the research question: what is the role of intentional physical design in providing for and sustaining the life of intentional communities? (For the purposes of this study, “intentional physical design” or “design” refers to the conscious decisions made to provide physical accommodation for communal function.) To answer this question, I analyze six different intentional communities across the US, on both coasts and in four different states: one rural, two suburban, and three urban. These locations are Twin Oaks in Louisa, Virginia; Arcadia in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Pacifica in Carrboro, North Carolina; Berkeley Cohousing in Berkeley, California; Ganas in Staten Island, New York; and Chaortica in San Francisco, California.

Overall, I find that design, while crucial in allowing intentional communities to live out their philosophies on a day to day basis, ultimately cannot not sustain a community alone. Their survival is also dependent on a larger understanding of external factors relating to the shifting zeitgeist in the wider urban world, and on adjustments to their vetting and recruitment practices

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in response. Thus, while physical design plays a crucial role in day-to-day functioning, communities cannot not rely upon it entirely without understanding the necessity of a continued relationship with the wider world, which is necessary for recruiting and for financial reasons. Continued engagement with the outside world means that these communities must confront the impossibility of stasis, despite their desire to maintain their founding vision. .

This thesis can be divided into roughly two parts. The first half explores the physical design elements in a variety of historical and contemporary intentional communities. A discussion of competing conceptions of life in the city from both traditional and anarchist points of view also presents a list of the most prominent utopian community design theories. It then examines how different motivations for withdrawing from the life of the city impact community design.

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LITERATURE REVIEW

Philosophies of City Life

If we are to decide which of the aforementioned unpleasant elements of city life that

intentional communities confront, we must ask ourselves if city life has always been as untenable as its critics perceive it to be today, and how different it truly is from a rural society. The philosophical study of the polis can be traced back to Aristotle in the 300s BC; however, the idea of the city as a transcendent experience dates to the German sociological movement of the 1900s. In “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Georg Simmel posits that life in a dense environment is fundamentally isolating and overstimulating, because it triggers an “excess of psychic stimulation” which causes residents to close themselves off emotionally and transcend to an anonymous consciousness.

Simmel’s colleague, Oswald Spengler, argues in “The Soul of the City” that all cities are destined for a collapse such as that of the Roman Empire, because they will unsuccessfully attempt to expand the “folk spirit” of the agrarian age that cannot be extended to an anonymous cityscape.11_{These ideas of the city’s brevity and anonymity are complemented by literature}

tracing urban life back to its rural roots. Prehistoric archeologist V. Gordon Childe proposes the creation of cities as “the resultant and symbol of a revolution that initiated a new economic stage in the evolution of society.” According to Childe, this “urban revolution” during the Stone Age is

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what transformed rural communities into cities through significant increases in population size, surplus provisions, artisan specialization, and the emergence of trade and barter economies. It is through these functions that market exchange became rational and most contacts and interactions grew impersonal.12

In the Chicago school of urban sociology, Louis Wirth agrees with Simmel in citing the theory of “anomie”—or isolation—caused by the “superficiality, the anonymity, and transitory character” of city life in which the density and proximity of individuals not bound by social or community ties devolves into competition and exploitation.13_{In “Urbanism as a Way of Life,”}

Wirth explains that the separation of work from residence and the lack of home ownership that occurs in a city means that the concept of the neighborhood is not strong enough to maintain the community. He writes:

“Frequent close physical contact, coupled with great social distance, accentuates the reserve of unattached individuals toward one another and, unless compensated for by other opportunities for response, gives rise to loneliness. The necessary frequent movement of great numbers of individuals in a congested habitat gives occasion to friction and irritation. Nervous tensions which derive from such personal frustrations are accentuated by the rapid tempo and the complicated technology under which life in dense areas must be lived.” 14

For sociologist Emile Durkheim, the concept of “anomie” in the city is caused by a lack of community or social connection, which often grows out of employment and civic engagement. This theory of loneliness is explored by sociologists Ferdinand Tönnies (in the 1800s) and the aforementioned Robert Putnam (in the 21st_{century). Tönnies identifies two organizations of}

individuals: gemeinschaft (community and family life) and gsellschaft (society and city life), in

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which the former is an instinctual, ancient desire for intimacy with others, and the latter is an advanced, rational desire for individual choice15_{. He argues that the emergence of city life means}

a renunciation of family life. This idea of solitude and individualism is echoed, 200 years later, in Putnam’s “Bowling Alone,” which identifies a strong decline in American civic engagement since the 1960s. Putnam cites generational change, new technologies, the breakdown of the traditional family unit, and geographic sprawl as potential causes of this decline. 16

Planners and philosophers, however, have not always taken these assessments of city life as inescapable fact. In fact, the emergence of socialist utopias or even anarchic urban planning movements proposes several prescriptions for more pleasant living conditions, and criticizes the deeper capitalist conceptions of design that accompanied the industrial revolution and its organization of cities. In “Planning the Capitalist City” historian and urbanist Richard Foglesong explains a certain theoretical impossibility of planning in a capitalist system. Planning is “organizing the urban built environment consistent with human needs,” he says, but a capitalist system based around making a profit from land will always prioritize market forces over human need. American society has long upheld the accumulation of property and capital as a key tenet of individual success, and Foglesong argues that this creates a “property contradiction” in American cities due to the simultaneous social nature of land and its private ownership and control. If land is a basic human need, its presence as a market asset will warp its use. 17_Our

society has obviously forged ahead with designating and commercializing land, so where does this leave the field of planning? These critiques of capitalist urban planning have generated many concrete ideas for alternative community designs. These plans were implemented or

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commissioned for a variety of reasons and involved varying degrees of separation from mainstream urbanism.

Elements of Utopian Community Design

The term “utopian” comes from Thomas More’s 1516 satirical work, “Utopia,” which describes an island that contains 54 towns with a total population of 80,000. Each town is divided into 30 households, with shared mealtimes of 500 people at each. Vices like gambling are prohibited, and members spend six hours a day contributing to “community labor,” which supposedly recreates the village-scale of past eras.18_{Although there is no way of knowing how}

sincere More’s plans really were, a veritable field of “utopian” socialist planning grew out of his ideas, spurred on by the emergence of increasing industrialization and urbanization in Western and Central Europe and the US by the 19th_century.

The ideas of socialist Robert Owen were among the first to be implemented in early North American utopian design. The intentional community of New Harmony in Indiana was a former Lutheran settlement that Owen re-established in 1825 as part of his grand plan for self-ruled communal living, with about 2,500 individuals on 0.8 acres and coordinated labor, cooking, and childcare. By 1829, it had been essentially abandoned—Owen blamed its lack of success on the town having been established prior to his community’s settlement, suspecting that members had been reluctant or unable to establish a sense of personal domain over the space.19

Around the same time, French philosopher Charles Fourier pioneered the “Fourierist movement” in the 1800s, and established several communities in the American Midwest around 1844. These were different from Owen’s plan in that they were established in rural areas, far from pre-existing urban environments, in order to completely rebuild according to certain design

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specifications. Fourier’s designs were based on the organizational unit of the “phalanstère” (a mix of “phalanx” and “monastère” [monastery]), which was designed to house 1,600 people over 6000 acres (see Figures 1 and 2). Fourier had predicted certain criteria for the success of his intentional communities, notably a “passional attraction” that combined moral, cognitive, and affective commitment, so that the appeal of staying was always greater than leaving.20_However,

his initial communities in Ohio and Wisconsin were all abandoned by 1850.

Perhaps the most famous of these initial North American utopias is Oneida, established by John Humphrey Noyes in New York in 1848. Although it was similarly organized around communal land use, its design was heavily influenced by Noyes’s sexual and religious convictions, which can be characterized as Bible Communism or Biblical Perfectionism. The

20_{Fishman, 2016}

Top, Figure 1: Fourier’s phalanx sketch (Source: Google Images)

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community at Oneida prioritized the inclusion of nature in a “pleasantly designed space” in order to foster community and spirituality, and was meticulously designed. It covered 265 acres and included orchards, meadows, and silverware and furniture businesses. The main area included the Mansion House, built in 1862, with a Children’s House, a South Wing, the “Tontine” (for food preparation), and a lounge in later years (see Figures 3, 4, and 5). The group’s commitment to “stirpiculture”—a form of selective breeding in which children are raised by a neutral “committee” rather than their biological parents—governed much of the design of their main children’s area, which needed to be removed from main living quarters. The concepts of “free love” and “mutual criticism” also necessitated certain large common rooms for meetings. By 1878, it had around 300 members, but

Noyes was forced out due to statutory rape accusations, and Oneida disbanded in 1880. However, the living quarters were preserved as a tourist site, and certain Noyes family members still maintain a presence there. 21

21_{Encyclopedia Britannica, 2019}

Left, Figure 3: Sketch of Noyes compound (Source: Google Images) Top Right, Figure 4: Noyes compound

(Source: Google Images)

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Moving from rural to urban/suburban community design, we might consider British urban planner Ebenezer Howard the father of modern utopian planning. The groundbreaking publication “Garden Cities of Tomorrow” in 1902, rests on the principles of collective housing and communal land ownership, and favors social reform (thus more related to planning anarchists than mainstream planning movements). Howard sees the city as an “urban slum” and wants to establish “a colony in someplace well beyond the reach of London smoke” that can be accessed by all income levels. 22_{Howard proposes to create this through “homesteading,” where}

inhabitants can resolve both the conundrum of rural under-development and “city crampedness.”23_{The Garden City, as it is known, is organized to contain 32,000 inhabitants on}

5,000 acres of land, arranged in a circular shape with an open shared space, village green, folk hall, and houses laid out on the inner 1,000 acres. Howard also adds a green agricultural belt on the surrounding 4,000 acres for food provision (see Figures 6, 7, and 8). The graphic below Howard’s plan reads, “A Group of Slumless, Smokeless Cities.” These garden cities are meant to be independent organisms, not just satellites in relation to a larger metropolis. However, Howard’s plan for the Garden City did not endure into the modern age. Today, Garden Cities such as Letchworth, England (see Figure 7) are exactly what he advocated against. Howard’s ideas were absorbed into the capitalist city-building movement and gradually became synonymous with “commuter towns,” or purely residential areas that service larger areas where its residents work—not true “cities” at all. 24

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These alternative conceptions of community design did, however, grow to influence mainstream planning. Planner Clarence Perry started a movement of community-based urban neighborhood design in Forest Hills, Queens, in New York City, in 1929. Perry’s concept of the “neighborhood unit” utilizes both social and physical engineering to create a “family-life community.” He imagines a neighborhood divided into “home blocks” with passages to communal spaces removed from traffic, and promises “intimate face-to-face association.” His design organizes 5,000-9,000 residents on 160 acres. He reserves 10% of the land for parks, with schools, churches, and communal recreation centers in the middle of the neighborhood on curvilinear roads, all within a quarter mile of the home blocks. Traffic, shopping, and arterial roads are relegated to the periphery (see Figures 9, 10, 11). 25

25_{Lowham, 2009}

Top Left, Figure 6: Howard’s Sketch (Source: Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 1902)

Top Right, Figure 7: Letchworth (Source: Google Earth)

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Today, the most common form of the intentional community in urban areas is cohousing, which has been most popular in Scandinavia. The idea of “living together privately” in a cohousing development began in Denmark in 1972, when 27 families started a “bofaellesskaber” (literally, “living community”) in order to find the “missing link” between utopia and the isolated nuclear single-family unit.26_{Trudeslund (see below) in Birkerød, Denmark, is one of these early}

developments, and emphasizes private dwellings in tandem with community living: shared laundry, workshops, areas for children, guest rooms, and safe areas with parking clearly separated (see Figures 12, 13, and 14).27

26_{Larsen, 2019} 27_{McCamant, 2011}

Top Left, Figure 9: Perry’s design

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This idea of elevated family life as a result of shared childcare and household duties is codified by the feminist utopian community design movement, famously explained by Dolores Hayden in “What Would a Non-Sexist City Look Like?”, an essay that revolves around the communal organization of domestic duties that frequently fall to women. It eschews the capitalist single-family home organization and “wasteful duplication of existing amenities” and works toward “not an end to private life altogether, but community services to support the private household” (see Figure 15).28

28_{Hayden, 1980}

Top Left, Figure 12: overview of Trudeslund (Source: McCamant, 2011)

Top Right, Figure 13: house diagram of Trudeslund (Source: McCamant, 2011)

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The aforementioned analysis of different conceptions of the city, early utopian socialist thinkers, and modern planners makes up the bulk of literature supporting what those in this field have come to call the “communities movement.” This term can include both those who study intentional communities and those who choose to participate in them—and within this, there is a strong relation to the field of behavioral psychology.

Perhaps the two most influential works that the communities movement engages with are “Walden Two,” by behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, and “A Pattern Language,” from psychologists at The University of California at Berkeley.

“Walden Two,” Skinner’s 1948 fictional account of a college professor’s visit to a utopian community, is a veritable blueprint for the more rural North American communities that grew out of the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s. Skinner pokes fun at the extreme nature of the community’s obsession with design as its head designer declares, “all we need is adequate behavioral engineering. The majority of people do not want to plan. They want to be free of the responsibility of planning. What they ask is merely some assurance that they will be

Left, Figure 15: Hayden’s

comparison of modern suburbs (A) with her plan to add more collective household space (B)

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decently provided for. At Walden Two, a man’s room is his castle. We replace intelligence with instinct…and their behavior is determined, yet they’re free.” Yet, the community of Twin Oaks (one of the six communities studied in this thesis) takes its design primarily from the organizational qualities mentioned in Skinner’s book.29

Meanwhile, the 1977 “A Pattern Language,” identifies 253 patterns of designing cities, towns, neighborhoods, and buildings that form a certain architectural vocabulary pattern, alongside design maxims such as “people need an identifiable spatial unit to belong to,” “the artificial separation of houses and work creates intolerable rifts in people’s inner lives,” and “without common land, no social system can thrive.” It places an emphasis on gathering nodes where community members can collect in “activity pockets” and promotes movement between rooms in service of “constant informal contact (see Figure 16).”30

Types of Separatism

In more recent years, designs for utopian communities (in either cohousing, co-living, or commune form) have been replicated across the world for various reasons. The majority of

29_{Skinner, 1948}

30_{Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, 1977}

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current intentional communities (past and present) fall into five categories: political, religious, sexual, ecological, and community-based. These motivations for separation frequently overlap, and those that do often garner the most media attention. The story of the “Rajneeshpuram” commune for example, was recently turned into a popular Netflix series. At its height in the 1980s, it was hailed as “a New Age, free-love utopia in the Oregon desert”, where the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh preached sex-positivity, a blend of Eastern and Western medicine, and religion.31_{Similarly, John Humphrey Noyes’s “Perfectionist” lifestyle at Oneida combined both}

sexual and religious extremism in a way that continues to spark public interest and ensures that it is frequently included as the most visible historical example of an IC.32_{The black liberation}

group MOVE in Philadelphia also combined political and ecological motives, with activism on behalf of African Americans, animal rights, and environmentalism. It occupied a compound of about 110 houses in the 1980s, which was destroyed in 1985 by a city-sanctioned bombing33_.

Of course, the majority of current ICs are the ecological or community-based type. They are grown more out of a desire for an alternative or sustainable housing lifestyle than for complete separatism for religious, political, or sexual reasons.

Levels of Modern Communalism

This abbreviated history of urban philosophy, intentional community design, and separatist motivations brings us to the modern intentional community. Members of intentional

31_{Urban, 2018}

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communities, or ICs, may have differing definitions of the term, but according to the Foundation for Intentional Communities (the most widely recognized affiliation for ICs), there are 1,759 established or forming ICs worldwide.34_{For the purposes of this study, there are seven criteria}

for an IC: 1) the presence of five or more adult members, 2) conscious and voluntary association of members, 3) self-governance (no outside authoritative committee), 4) collective or shared land or housing, 5) perception of the community as ideologically or geographically separate from the mainstream, 6) personal benefits that do not impact collective group decision-making, and 7) long-term goals that will outlive single members.35_{As we will see, intentional communities can}

vary greatly in the degree to which daily life is shared, with implications for housing and economic activity. I will also return to this definition as it relates to the community’s longevity.

Housing Integration

As previously discussed, there are several design variations within the framework of an IC. The three most common are cohousing, co-living, and the commune. In urban environments, the most common variation of the three is cohousing, which is defined by Cohousing.Org as a “community that is intentionally designed, with ample common spaces surrounded by private homes.”36_{It involves single-family homes oriented around strong communal spaces, particularly}

a common house with laundry, kitchen, and meeting spaces. Co-living can indicate any style of communal living, and encompasses the commune organization, as well. A commune serves as the most extreme form of co-living and cohousing, in which members have only a private room to themselves, if that.

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Economic Integration

Members of intentional communities can choose to share their diets, meals, incomes, clothes, chores, and livelihoods. Most communes organize all meals and diets communally, whereas co-living and cohousing might have 2-3 shared meals per week or per month. Rural commune ICs are the most likely to involve shared incomes and livelihoods, as they are more self-contained than their urban or suburban counterparts, and often operate a community business that members might be a part of. Some might have a split shared income (for example, an inner group of elders will give up personal bank accounts to show their commitment, but not all members are required to do the same). Income might also be replaced by community labor hours or dues—most rural communes require a certain number of community labor hours per week, and suburban and urban cohousing or co-living options frequently require some labor or monetary contribution on top of dues or rent. 37_{I will explore this variation in my later analysis of}

the six communities in the study.

Corporate Responses

Unsurprisingly, a growing number of corporations and real-estate companies are catching on to the concepts mentioned throughout this literature review as they grow to understand the attraction of more community-oriented urban life. Although it may seem counter-intuitive to package counter-culture for mass consumption at a profit, several pre-fabricated pseudo-intentional communities exist in modern metropolises. There are 15 “co-living companies” in New York City alone, which tout themselves as “adult dorms” in which to try co-living with strangers on short-term leases. Companies such as Ollie and Dwell explain that co-living is successful because it “removes the politics and annoyance of splitting bills, keeping common

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spaces clean, and furnishing an apartment.”38_{(Of course, many non-corporate ICs would likely}

say that outsourcing cleaning and book-keeping to a third party in this way would diminish the communal lifestyle that defines an IC.) Some companies offer hotel-like services with planned activities and events, and have taglines like “city living made better.” The largest umbrella corporations—Common, The Collective, and Quarters—have all expanded out of their initial bases in London recently, with Quarters raising $500 million for the 2020 New York initiative. 39

Whether it’s caused by the influx of technology-oriented millennials who represent urban arrivals, a general societal dissatisfaction with urban anonymity, or something else entirely, if these corporate expansions tell us anything, it is that interest in alternative city living is becoming widespread. This study views intentional communities as a response to concerns about city living, and thus attempts to examine the extent to which the physical design elements of ICs contribute to their sustainability.

METHODOLOGY

Designing the Study

I selected the 6 aforementioned intentional communities: 1 rural, 2 sub-urban, and 3 urban, (n=6) on the basis of certain characteristics, notably the number of full-time residents (at

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least 10), duration of existence (at least 4 years), openness/responsiveness to visitors, and accessibility and financial travel limitations. In addition, these communities cover certain representative areas: both coasts of the US and a range from a rural area (pop. 1,600) to two variations of suburban (pop. 60,000-122,000), to a variation of urban (pop. 500,000-800,000).

Observation

This study uses two main methods of evaluating the design elements of intentional communities: one is observation-based, and the other is based on informational interviews. In general, these observations provide an estimate of how many different functions the community can accommodate, and how it operates (financially, organizationally, historically).

Observations include:

1) sketches of each intentional community’s layout, and their blueprints, if available 2) rough measurements of each type of area (kitchen, bathroom, sleeping areas, meeting area, events space, dining, gardening, etc)

3) distance from major roadways or arterials

4) presence of other barriers/buffers to the wider world 5) space dedicated to parking

6) capacity and frequency of use of each type of area 7) proportion of private space to communal space

8) presence of a business model or goods production attached to community success (presence of a specific space for this activity and how it coexists with other activities)

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Interview Questions

The interview part of the study engages more directly with the economic, administrative, and personal elements of life in intentional communities and their design. The interview consists of 11 questions, centering on the impact of the community’s physical design on the relationships of its residents., and lasting approximately an hour. All questions (shown below) are approved by The University of North Carolina’s IRB, with the stipulation that participants are offered written consent forms and audio-interviews are transcribed and deleted.

1) To what extent did economic, social, or political factors play a role in your decision to join an intentional community?

2) To what extent does this space feel like “home” to you?

3) What proportion of time do you spend in a private v. communal space? How often do you gather in the communal space daily?

4) Is your membership in the community related to your job or field, or do you have a job outside of it? (How has living in the community impacted your income or financial well-being?)

5) To what degree you would say you are integrated into the mainstream economy or market, or tapped into “the grid”?

6) To what extent did you play a role in the construction of the community (physical labor, leadership, etc)?

7) How does the design of your communal spaces create intimacy and community? How does the design of the space impact your capacity to host or organize communal meals, meetings, events?

8) How did you, as a community, adapt the space/building/land to your needs? What layout were you originally working with? What principles did you have in mind?

9) What are the limitations of your space, from a design and legal perspective?

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11) How satisfied are you with the level of communalism/intimacy? (What design elements would you change, if so?)

Community Backgrounds

The six different intentional communities in this study span across both American coasts, ranging from 13 to 100 residents and from less than an acre to almost 500. Some have been around for 4 years, others for more than half a century.

Rural Intentional Communities (1)

Twin Oaks is located in Louisa, Virginia, which is classified as a rural area with a population of about 1,600.40_{It covers 485 acres, with 85 adult members and 15 children. It was}

founded in 1967 (53 years from present), and consists of 8 residences for 10-20 people each (one private room per person). This organization is classified as co-living and cohousing, and Twin Oakers often self-identify as “communards.” All meals are shared, and members work 42 hours a week to earn labor credits within the community—Twin Oaks has outward-facing businesses in hammock fabrication, indexing, seed and ornamental flower provision, and tofu production. Their website description presents it as such: “Twin Oaks is an intentional community in rural central Virginia, made up of around 90 adult members and 15 children. Since the community's beginning in 1967, our way of life has reflected our values of cooperation, sharing, nonviolence, equality, and ecology.”41

Suburban Intentional Communities (2)

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Arcadia is located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which is classified as a suburban area with a population of about 60,000.42_{It covers about 16 acres of land, with about 49 adult}

members and 13 children. It was founded starting in 1991 and has been operational since 1995 (25 years from present). It consists of 33 individual single-family units—and therefore qualifies as a cohousing complex—with shared meals 1-3 times a month, and no shared income. Residents complete four hours of community labor credits per household a month.43

Pacifica is located in Carrboro, North Carolina, which is classified as a suburban area with a population of about 20,000.44_{It covers 8.3 acres of land, with 74 adult members and 19}

children. It was founded in 2006 and has been operational since 2007 (13 years from present). It consists of 46 individual single-family units—qualifying as a cohousing complex—with shared meals 1-3 times a month. There is no shared income, but members pay $100 per month in dues, and complete 4 hours of community labor per household per month. Their website describes it as such: “Pacifica is a cohousing community of about 100 people in Carrboro, N.C., that dates back to 2006. Community, diversity, sustainability and affordability are the four guiding principles upon which we are founded.”45

Urban Intentional Communities (3)

Berkeley Cohousing is located in Berkeley, CA, with a population of about 122,000, which is classified as an urban environment.46_{It covers 0.8 acres of land, with 34 adults and 9}

children. It was established in 1992 and operational in 1994 (26 years from present). It consists

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of 14 individual single-family units—thus qualifying as a cohousing complex—with 3 shared meals per week (on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays for the past 25 years) and no shared income.47

Chaortica is located in San Francisco, California, which is classified as a densely urban area with a population of about 800,00048_{. It consists of 1 building with 12 adult members (no}

children). It was founded in 2016 (4 years from present) and can be categorized as co-living and cohousing, with one weekly scheduled shared meal a week, but generally 5+ per week. A monthly fee of $310 is required, but there is no shared income. Their website describes it as such: “Chaortica is a blossoming community of radical, ambitious, and inquisitive humans in the heart of San Francisco. We share food and and self-govern through a mix of consensus and do-ocracy. We resist rules and hierarchy wherever possible and substitute trust and communication. We are creating a better world by living it every day.”49

Ganas is located on Staten Island in New York City, New York (an urban area with a population of about 480,000 people50_{). It covers 2 acres, and has 70 adult members and 5}

children. It was founded in 1978 (42 years from present) and consists of 7-8 shared houses— qualifying as cohousing and co-living—with shared dinner every night and other unscheduled shared meals. The board of directors has a shared income, but all non-board members complete 4 hours of community labor per week and pay monthly dues. Their website describes it as such: “Our purpose is to bring reason and emotion together in daily problem solving, in order to

47_{ic.org/directory/berkeleycohousing} 48_{socialexplorer.com}

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create our world, with love, the way we want it to be. Open minds make it possible to talk together and understand each other better. Ongoingly, we are learning how to cooperate, care for each other and share resources. We welcome those who want to join us in learning together.”51

The research at these 6 communities was carried out over six consecutive weekends in December and January of 2019 and 2020, starting with Berkeley Cohousing and Chaortica on the West Coast, then Ganas in New York City, Pacifica and Arcadia closer to home in North Carolina, and lastly to Twin Oaks in Virginia (see Table 1 in Appendix 1 for basic details).

DATA ANALYSIS

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This study asks the question: what is the role of design in providing for and sustaining the life of intentional communities? Across the case-study communities, two aspects of design stand out: 1) there is great variation in the degree of physical separation from the wider world, and 2) similarly, the adaptation or establishment of physical space for communal functions varies greatly across communities while enabling day-to-day functions. However, many non-design concerns regarding the community’s longevity must be taken into account, with day-to-day functionality at risk of becoming unsustainable in the face of continued economic relationships with the outside world or a dependence upon the fast-changing external world for recruitment.

Design Element 1: Separation from the Mainstream

All six communities display at least some level of separation from the mainstream, both physical and psychological, although to varying degrees. This ranges from physical buffers to a general community sentiment of being a separate entity or existing outside of the mainstream. The most cohesive ranking I am able to establish traces a general feeling of belief and purpose in the community, in which Chaortica, Twin Oaks, and Ganas show the strongest coherence, and Berkeley Cohousing, Arcadia, and Pacifica show the least.

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The ICs in question, because they desire social separation to one degree or another, often choose to establish physical buffers to separate themselves from the outside world. Overall, the sense of community does not correlate exactly with the degree of psychological separation, nor does the presence of buffers (i.e. Arcadia and Pacifica have more buffers than Ganas, Berkeley Cohousing, or Chaortica, but report a lower sense of community). These physical buffers are also related to the presence of a business model in communities, which can act as an interface with the outside world.

Chaortica in San Francisco exemplifies the embrace of the folk-village scale, and it is the strongest community in terms of community spirit, even as it exhibits the lowest levels of separation (both in physical difficulty in access, but also in participation in the outside world). In terms of observational data, it has the fewest buffers of the six communities—only a driveway and a backyard separate it from the other single family homes in dense San Francisco’s Ashbury Neighborhood (see Figures 17 and 18). Economic separation is also apparent, in that all residents work outside the community. The only relationship it has with outside authorities is with the landlord, with whom they are in agreement to have an undisclosed number of people in the space.

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paradigm of individuality, like somehow people think living with roommates is childish.” From a

perspective of economic integration, Chaortica has no business venture related to the community

and all economic activity stems from outside jobs.

On the other hand, Twin Oaks represents the most intense physical separation from the mainstream, and also exhibits a strong return to folk-village separatism. It occupies about 500 acres, surrounded by wooded forest on all sides but the front entrance (which is a several-mile-long driveway) (see Figure 19). It is also located in a town with fewer than 1,600 people, and the nearest establishment is a church about 10 minutes away. Because Twin Oakers eschew car ownership, they voluntarily create a buffer in which it takes effort to leave the community. A car leaves five times a week for Louisa (the nearest town), three times a week for Charlottesville, and once a week for Richmond. Twin Oakers can use some of their monthly allowance of $75 to make these trips, usually in carpool—going by one’s self is $25. Their relationship to the city and wider authorities is also a creative one. By creating a statement of religious purposes, they qualify as a 501d non-profit (the same as extends to monasteries) in which Twin Oakers can pay individual income tax based on their share of the profits in the community for the year.

Left, Figure 17: Street View of Chaortica

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Twin Oakers were very open with me about the intentionality of returning to the village lifestyle. As V. told me, “we operate on a village scale. If you’re in a city, or if you’re living in a single-family or single-person dwelling, just to do any activity with people, it takes a lot of time and energy and resources to get to them. Here, movies, yoga classes, parties, and art gatherings are literally an 8 minute walk or a 2 minute walk.” On the other hand, Twin Oaks also has the most developed outward-facing economic business models of the six. Its businesses in tofu, hammock-making, and seeds require daily interfacing with the outside world and enable its daily function.

Ganas also represents a certain physical and psychological separation from the mainstream, more similar to Twin Oaks than any other community. Although at one point it was spread over 9 houses, it now occupies 7 residences, which includes three on one side of Corson Avenue, two on the other side of the street, and two on Scribner St, attached through the backyard. There are virtually no buffers to the outside world—their houses are as equally distanced from each other as they are from houses that are not part of the community. Because so many members work in Manhattan or other boroughs of New York City, the community intentionally bought houses that were within a 20 minute walk to the Staten Island Ferry (which is then a roughly 30 minute commute to the base of Manhattan to arrive directly at Wall Street)

Right, Figure 19: Aerial View of Twin Oaks

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(see Figure 20). The folk-village organization is clear in the community’s organization— members are able to move there and work in the businesses (primarily the coffee shop/bookstore and furniture store) Ganas owns in the community without interacting with outside life. As E. explained to me, their separation from the mainstream has evolved over time. “We wanted it to be more porous, which makes it more difficult to maintain. We were very insular in the past. Because all of our economic needs are taken care of, you can sort of “stay on campus” indefinitely,” he said.

The three cohousing communities also exhibit certain elements of separation, although they are by design less “radical” since they do not disturb the mainstream notion of single-family units.

Berkeley Cohousing is the most communal of the three, and also has physical and psychological buffers. All fourteen residences are sandwiched into a 0.8 acre parcel of land (see Figure 21). Its primary buffer is a fourteen-spot parking lot that faces the street and is also the only place of ingress and egress for residents. The other three sides of the parcel are fenced in, and residents told me that they are not familiar with their neighbors. The community is roughly eighteen blocks away from the major highway (580) and a ten minute drive from the Berkeley North BART station (see Figure 22). As C. told me, the village scale is recreated in the age

Left, Figure 20: Ganas is about 20 minutes’ walk from the Staten Island Ferry

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range, which was “birth to 87 in 2019.” However, the lack of economic or physical buffer results in a high level of integration into the mainstream, primarily because it does not have community-based employment. C. elaborated that, “people here mostly work. Some are retirees, some independent folks, some between jobs. The community is just legally its own condo association. And we're just here like any other neighbor or even the city grid, and we’re using city services, paying taxes, property taxes and so on.”

Arcadia has a similar relationship with separation and buffers to Berkeley Cohousing. It is protected by a several-mile long driveway and an outer parking rim. North Greensboro St, which runs through Carrboro, NC, is the nearest point of ingress/egress (see Figure 23). It is also located in a forested area that separates it from other developments. The sense of village-scale came up in many of my conversations with residents. They stated that they enjoy not having, for example, personal driveways— but value their proximity to town, with everyone working

outside of the community and caretakers or home health

aides coming in and out daily. No economic activity

relating to community life takes place, but households

contribute 3 hours of community labor per month.

Left, Figure 21: The Berkeley Cohousing Parcel

Right, Figure 22: Berkeley Cohousing’s location in Berkeley Source: Zillow; Google Earth

Left, Figure 23: Arcadia (red roofs) in relation to N.

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Pacifica has similar buffers to Arcadia, which is to be expected since it was designed by the same architect, Giles Blunden. It is located closer to North Greensboro St. than Arcadia, and is not as wooded (see Figure 24). It has a similar outer parking rim, though the houses are closer together than at Arcadia. Pacificans enjoy a highly integrated lifestyle with the mainstream, and connect with the idea of a village scale. As P. discussed with me, “when I go into town, I bike. I can go out and get a drink, meet friends—all that stuff’s accessible.” He also expressed appreciation for the community’s operation in contrast with the mainstream, saying, “one of the things I like about living in cohousing is that it forces you to interact with people you might not normally interact with, and you have to work with them to solve problems. That is an underappreciated skill in modern society.” Although Pacificans complete 4 hours of community labor a month per household, they have the option to pay extra dues to avoid this. No economic activities relating to the community take place.

Left, Figure 24: Aerial View of Pacifica (blue roofs)

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Design Element 2: Establishment and Adaption of Space for Communal Functions

This study also finds that each community adapts and establishes its physical areas with communal functions in mind, with different levels of intentionality (see Graphics 1 and 2). I identify three ways in which each community addresses this: 1) with the presence of at least some private space for members (though to varying degrees), 2) with the creation of intentional gathering nodes, and 3) with flows of activity that create informal socialization as well as intentional. At each community, members were able to identify some elements of community design as either inherently “good” or “bad” at contributing to the community spirit.

Graphic 1: LEVEL OF PRIVATE SPACE

Less Personal Space: Single Room More Personal Space: Single Family Home

Co-living Cohousing Community

Commune

Ganas Chaortica

Pacifica

Arcadia Berkeley

Cohousing

Twin Oaks

Graphic 2: SELF-IDENTIFIED INTENTIONALITY OF PHYSICAL DESIGN

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At Chaortica, the community encompasses one single-family house in the Ashbury Heights neighborhood of San Francisco on a 47,950 square foot lot (the house itself is 3000 square feet). It has four floors including a basement and an attic, as well as an outdoor garden. All areas of the house are common areas, except for personal bedrooms and cubby storage. All bathrooms are shared. The issue of private versus public space is one that members are eager to point out as the most important a community can confront. The house technically has 5 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms, but houses 12 people. The basement serves as a practice room or retreat for community members who need quiet while working from home, and the first floor is entirely communal space: a dining room, kitchen, living room, half-bathroom, and cubbies for storage. The second floor contains 5 bedrooms and 1 bathroom, and the attic is an open space with the second bathroom. The attic represents the strongest example of adapting space for community function; Chaorticans put up plywood and drywall to create 6 upstairs “nook” bedrooms (see figures below).

Interestingly, Chaorticans did not report spending very much time in their personal

spaces, even though they did value them. On one end, T. mentioned, “other than sleeping, I

spend almost all of my time in the communal space. I work from home sometimes, so I can work downstairs or in my room. I really only use my bedroom to sleep.” JL. chimed in, “it's nice to have that little zone…the place where I tuck myself away as needed. That’s my little nest. We joke that if you get really angry, you could slam a curtain in someone’s face.”

Pacifica Arcadia

Twin Oaks

Chaortica _Ganas Berkeley

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The instance of gathering nodes was extremely clear in discussing the space with community members—particularly in the case of the kitchen and the concept of communal meals. The most-used spaces are the kitchen and the living room (see Figures 25, 26, and 27). JL. was adamant that if he were at home, he would be in the living room or the kitchen. The community only has scheduled communal meals on Sundays, but as T. clarified, “we end up doing some kind of communal meal every night, even if it’s only 2-3 people, because you just show up and someone’s cooking.” JS. was even clearer about the role of the kitchen, saying, “shared food is a huge part of co-op culture, the one thing I recommend strongly to people. Because the kitchen is just where people bond, which has been true across almost every culture. If you’re not sharing food, you’re incentivized to never share your food because you lose money.”

The concept of informal socialization (which I denote as any casual or accidental meetups of members which are not scheduled) is also a key element of what keeps the community intact. As T. said, “the first thing that comes to mind is the fact that the first floor is all communal space. When you’re on the first floor, you’re engaging in the community. And we also do a good job of leaving people alone, but also the fact that the living room is so cozy, it creates a lot of cuddly moments.” Community members said they enjoyed the ad hoc interactions that come with having so little personal space.

A number of the community members at Chaortica have experience living in a much larger (roughly 40-person) intentional community in the area, so they have strong opinions about design elements that work well or poorly. T.

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sort of drawn in. The worst design would be lots of individual rooms before the communal space.” We also discussed how intentional the design of the space truly was. Because they have simply adapted a single family home, they are working with a 100% fabricated and pre-established building. The intentionality of the space comes from the furniture they pick out or “codes of hanging out” that dictate where people want to congregate, as JL. explained to me (see Figure 28).

Twin Oaks, though the most communal of all six communities, still retains the same design considerations of private space, key gathering nodes, and informal socialization that the others do.

Because there is so little personal space (and few personal items) at Twin Oaks, the concept of one’s bedroom as a sanctuary is extremely clear. Even within families and couples, each member is encouraged to have his/her own space to retreat to. As K. said, “really the only private space is our rooms. The living rooms in our buildings are public spaces and workspaces.” The role of technology has also strengthened this need for personal space. #11 (who asked to be

Top Left, Figure 25: Original Attic of House

Top Middle, Figure 26: personal room/nook

Top Right, Figure 27: adapted attic

Source: Zillow, author’s photos Lower Left, Figure 28:

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designated as a number rather than a letter abbreviation) declared, “as personal devices have gotten more popular, I think sharing communal spaces in the evening has dwindled. I think that’s hurt the social structure of Twin Oaks.” J. added, “privacy is a complex phenomenon in community. It’s like a dorm but you live there your whole life.”

Since Twin Oaks has the most space of the six communities, it has the largest number of gathering nodes. The most used building is ZK, which comprises the main kitchen and has a large gathering and dining space (see Figure 29). It also serves as the hub of information for the community, with several walls of 3x5 notecards detailing visits into town or community member updates, as well as the “Opinions and Information” board (the primary place for members to literally pencil in their thoughts about changes to the community). Twin Oakers also explained to me that communal meals play a key role in establishing certain gathering nodes such as ZK. As V. said, “You have the feel of a lot of space, but you don’t have to maintain a lot of space or pay for it, because of the structural design of shared meals and shared cooking.” Making at least two daily trips to ZK clearly enmeshes Twin Oakers in the community. J. echoed this idea, noticing “lots of people take their food from ZK back to their room. But I try to eat in ZK because it makes me feel more connected.”

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Oneida, and other business-related buildings) is primarily for the young adult Twin Oakers, and all three buildings share the kitchen at Llano. Families with children live in Morningside, and Appletree serves as the hospice or infirmary. Aside from ZK, the Ta Chai Living Room (fondly known as TCLR) has been established as the most attractive gathering node in the Courtyard (see Figures 29, 30, and 31).

The concept of informal socialization is also present. Although lunch and dinner are scheduled, as A. said, “meals are the most incidentally social because I never know who I’m going to run into or what I’m going to talk about… The fact that we share so many things, kitchen space and bathroom space makes it easy to run into people and have conversations.” The pathways across the grounds, especially, enable important ad hoc interactions. As K. said, “I like talking to people, and so just walking around I find it fairly easy to connect.” A. clarified that the whole community is open to interaction, saying, “looking around Twin Oaks, it’s as much mine as it is anyone else’s. One kind of unique thing about our space is that you can kind of walk into anyone’s house and make a snack in their kitchen and use their bathroom…because it’s kind of your house too.” V. echoed that the paths were key, saying, “we try to have our cars on the outside and our footpaths on the inside to have that kind of social crossover. It increases those logistical interactions.” We also discussed how smoking culture creates casual interactions. The smoking hut (called Compost Café) on a main path means that many social interactions happen as community members stop by.

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of building all three separate buildings. It increases that crossover and its more eco. As someone is frying their egg, someone else is reading a book.”

Twin Oakers’ feedback on “good” and “bad” design elements for community life, particularly about the placement of buildings and relationships with the natural environment, reveals a few design truths. #11 said, “there’s definite truth to the idea that if you want people to stay in community, you have to give them a sense that they built something and created something”—so Twin Oaks tries to involve community members in construction. He also believes that design isn’t one thing. “No matter what you do, you’re going to really please some people and really upset other people,” he advised. V. brought up very practical building considerations—insulation, low ceilings to seal in heat, and airlocks for noise control, among others. J. also took issue with a few of the changes that had been made, saying “our courtyard used to be the beating heart of the community, and instead of trying to build some sort of expansion onto Llano, ZK was built up the hill. So we have two beating hearts…and I think the split is kind of weird.” K. also commented on the role of the weather. “In the winter, there’s less incentive to see others,” she mentioned, and because Twin Oaks is so vast, casual interactions outside can decrease. Overall, everyone I talked to agreed that while certain elements are highly intentional, the community has been around for over 50 years and isn’t truly at risk of dissolving. As P. said, “there wasn’t a master plan. We grew sort of organically as our needs changed over time.”

Left, Figure 29: Main Dining Room at ZK at TO Middle, Figure 30: Morningstar Residence at TO

Right, Figure 31: TCLR, one of many gathering spaces at TO

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Ganas is similar to Twin Oaks in its function to enable communalism, but it is much more limited by its urban environment. The buildings are all four stories, dating from the 1830s to 1910, and as R. told me, “in a rural community, you can build a space that’s big enough to hold the whole community, but you can’t do that here. We adapted as best we could to the footprints of the house.” Like at the other six communities, all members are encouraged to have a private room, even within the family structure. However, E. mentioned that the community has a strong open-door policy, where “the idea is to push the private into the public.” This stems from the community’s unique origin as an antifascist political experiment in research psychology, which it has since moved further away from.

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The creation of spaces that allow for informal socialization is also essential at Ganas. The adaptation of multiple backyards between the two streets is an intentional effort to create more casual crossover between houses (see Figures 32 and 33). As R. told me, “I see it as a number of nodes and pathways, and you have a lot of different pathways. We have our main pathways: downstairs dining room and 48 are connected through the gardens. The garden is a crossover path. So, I might not even have deep conversations with people, but we might cross paths several times in a day…it’s a courtyard, with different nodes and constant crossover and opportunities for casual interactions.” F. also discussed the idea of interchangeable spaces, saying “S. [a founder] has reiterated that we would not have house identities and house personalities, because we’re all one community.” This is reflected in their reference to houses by their numerical addresses (135, 48, 134, 127, etc), whereas at Twin Oaks, members are encouraged to develop connections with different buildings and refer to them by name. R. also reiterated the importance of porches, saying, “the porches function as social spaces in the summers. There’s a lot of nooks and crannies, and I would say I don’t naturally seek out people but I appreciate contact with people, so the fact that I run into or cross paths with a lot of people is interesting to me.”

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way.” He added, “we thought, if we can negotiate, it doesn’t really matter how we design. The basic design principle was: hit a problem, negotiate. We didn’t think about what would happen.” On the other hand, R. had many thoughts about the intentionality of the design. “The common space in community design should be in the middle, and not off to the side,” he said, and “functionally, we realized it didn’t work well to have houses that were separated by other neighbors from the central houses.” He admitted, “I sort of feel like a lot has evolved. I think there are some conflicting visions of the community.” I will discuss later how this has affected the community’s potential longevity.

Berkeley Cohousing is the least intentionally designed of the three cohousing communities, in the sense that its structures had already been 60% renovated when the property was purchased. In cohousing, time spent in private space is obviously much higher than in more communal groups. As C. told me, “it's pretty much 90 percent the private space, 10 percent shared. We’re pretty much our own independent household economies.”

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Berkeley Cohousing has an extremely strong social culture in established spaces and gathering nodes. The Common House has a dining room, industrial kitchen, sun porch, children’s room, pantry, and mail/laundry room. As C. explained, the Common House is “the core part of the community. If people move in and they don't have the habit from the beginning, it's much harder to get established.” The dining room, in particular, is the main gathering node and has hosted 3 communal meals a week (Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday) for 25 years (see Figure 36). He mentioned the importance of “having not just one big space, the basic room, but different corners and spots for gathering.” Aside from the primary gathering node of the dining room, the community has strategically placed several benches and picnic tables in the open green space to create pockets of interaction (see Figures 34 and 35). This works especially well in the mild climate of Berkeley, which is less impacted by cold winters.

Berkeley Cohousing’s space is extremely limited, which increases informal social interaction. The laundry room/mailroom is one of the most oft-cited instances of casual interaction. In addition, the proximity of the houses to each other makes the porches ideal spaces for ad hoc conversations. As C. said, “these porches, we built out so they're close enough. So I can talk to the neighbor across without having to yell.” The pathways are also essential to informal social interaction in the community. C. explained, “it's just the bottleneck effect. People are walking down this path. So I can see my neighbors coming and going that way. Some people we know really well, others, you know, we might just say hi on the walk.”

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neighbors by knocking down fences. We've added tools, sheds and bike sheds, and what the city calls ‘structures of no significance.’ We actually approved a property plan filed with the city in the county that has dotted lines on it expansion areas. So we’ve got room to grow.” Most members of the community that I talked to expressed similar feelings of contentment with the spaces and the design adaptations they have been able to make.

Arcadia, as another cohousing community, exhibits similar adaptations of space for communal functions, and values private space to a significant degree. BL., one of the most involved members of the community said, “I would say even when I’m really active in Arcadia, I’m only in this space 10% of my time, it’s not a place I would be hanging out for hours throughout the day.” Other members echoed this conception of the Common House as a space for special events, and not as a usual stop in their routine.

Left, Figure 34: Main pathway in/out of BC

Middle, Figure 35: bench gathering node at BC

Right, Figure 36: Dining Room in Common House at BC