Why Am I Doing This?
From Building Community, Issue #01, Jan/Feb 2005

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.

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14 August 2005

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