co-housing info

[chelidon]

Another nearby co-housing project I'm learning about: http://www.katywil.com/

These projects are popping up like mushrooms around here (and elsewhere, I assume). It's interesting to me that so many people with common ideals are choosing to manifest those ideals in the form of intentional communities right now. My intuition is that beyond the kinds of heretical utopian idealization and isolationist or insular community-building that have occured throughout many periods of human history (often religiously-oriented, often fleeing persecution), we're also seeing a kind of lifeboat effect -- groups oriented not around any specific religious belief, but instead, a common deep-seated unease with the dominant culture, and a growing sense that the current world, and the enormous but perhaps quite brittle structures we live in and alongside daily, are not remotely sustainable. Something has to give. I get the impression from talking to a number of my colleagues in community-building that most of these new intentional communities are not looking for the new Eden, not boldly seeking the Promised Land or questing after some romantically-imagined Utopia. They're just hoping to reduce their footprint, and live in a more sustainable, simple, healthy and life-affirming way. Not colony ships, or even vessels of exploration, crewed by bold settlers or pilgrims or pioneers enacting their Manifest Destiny to find and conquer the New World, but instead, lifeboats, filled with hardy, cautious people with more humble ambition, hoping merely to find a slower, more intimate, life-sustaining way of life, and to weather the coming storms.

Comments

[kaidevis.livejournal.com]

We've had the same trend out here on the Left Coast for several years. Folks I know who would never have considered cohousing before are gathering friends and family and making their own sustainable liferafts for whatever comes down the pipeline. And yes, everything you say here.

(Love the new roof, btw!)

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I do think that people's instincts are kicking in, sensing the ending of a unique period when it was possible (if not very efficient) to go it alone. Or, rather, to have the illusory perception of going it alone, while actually being ever more dependant on complex, fragile globe-crossing chains of labor and infrastructure, more than any people before (or likely, after). Me, I'm not hoarding precious metals or whathaveyou, I'm trying to hoard skills ;> I figure those will come in handy, no matter what happens (or doesn't).