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Building Community came to be as I was sitting in a shopping mall
parking lot wondering why cohousing communities weren’t growing by
leaps and bounds. Why were we still building huge parking lots for cars
instead of human-scale village squares?
I looked up to see that
I was surrounded by residential high-rise buildings, eight buildings, filled
with people. Except for the wall around the parking lot and the distance
between the buildings and the shops created by the parking lot itself, all
these people could have walked to shopping. Why were we still designing
contradictory neighborhoods? Residential buildings next to shopping malls
that cannot be reached without cars?
Then I realized that
each floor of each of these buildings was as large as one cohousing
community. As a cohousing commmunity, each floor could have a kids room, a
multi-purpose dining room, and other shared facilitites and activities. The
building could have shared shopping carts and landscaped paths leading to
these shops.
Could condominium
buildings become communities, like cohousing?
I think the answer has
to be yes. The buildings are there. They are affordable. Billions of dollars
have been invested in constructing them and billions more are spent
maintaining them. They are filled with people of every sort. A greater or
richer diversity, the diversity that makes a neighborhood vibrant, could not
be fabricated.
Building Community was
born in that instant.
Building communities in
condos and other neighborhoods will require cultural as well as
physical changes. Like many suburban communities, condo culture says,
“Don’t talk to your neighbors. Respect their privacy.” Or,
“If you invite them in, you’ll never get rid of
them.”
The majority of condo
boards have as their main objective keeping the residents quiet, uninvolved,
and under control. There is no opportunity to engage with neighbors in ways
that preserve personal privacy while establishing commmunity traditions.
Common spaces are controlled by staff. Resident turn over is interpersonally
disruptive so people avoid even becoming acquainted.
Most of us have become
so unattached to our communities that planning our retirement is synonymous
with moving away. Do our neighbors and friends mean so little to us? Do we
have so little commitment to shared history that we want to escape it? Do we
plan so poorly that we outgrow our own lives, our communities?
How could residents
convert a high-rise into a community like cohousing, or a series of cohousing
communities? Or make a city street into a neighborhood? A suburb into a
village?
The question of
community is what is "home"? How many of us consider our buildings "home"? Or
even our communities? "Bedroom communities" are places where people sleep and
leave. Nothing else happens there. They are connected to the world by cars.
Is this the way it has to be?
Building Community is
about creating community where we live now, environmentally, economically,
and socially sustainable communities that work. Places that are home. Places
designed to be home.
This will require new
concepts of multi-household design, new organizational skills, and new
concepts of neighborhood. Above all it will require a plan, a strategy for
making it happen.
In our cities as well
as in many small towns, and certainly in the suburbs, more square feet are
now dedicated to parking cars than to hobbies, playgrounds, gardens, or
community gathering places. We have lost our town squares and neighorhood
pubs. While we cherish our cars because they provide us great freedom and
opportunity, what have we lost by having them dominate our lives? How does
our car culture affect our sense of place and belonging?
Or relationship to cars
is only one example of the habits we need to question to create living spaces
in place of concrete storage spaces.
What kind of
architecture do we need? What mix of generations and cultures? What life
styles? How do we create communities without starting from scratch? How do we
get from here to there? Where is there?
These are the questions
Building Community will explore.
We hope you will find
the newsletter helpful and inspiring, and that you will be moved to join our
mission to explore how we build communities in which we feel at
home.
For more information and to subscribe see "Building Community" at www.buildingcommunitynews.org
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