Sustainable Community: Learning from the Cohousing Model [Paperback]

PhD Graham Meltzer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 23, 2005

A unique investigation of cohousing (environmentally and socially innovative housing projects) in Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. The book contains 120 photographs, 50 tables and 30 diagrams.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dr Graham Meltzer is said to be the world's leading expert on cohousing. He is an architect, scholar and architectural photographer who consults, researches and lectures in the fields: environmental and social architecture, communal housing and communalism. He has co-authored one other book, presented at numerous conferences and published in international architectural and sociological journals.

Product Details

• Paperback: 190 pages
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing (March 23, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1412049946
• ISBN-13: 978-1412049948
• Product Dimensions: 10.6 x 8.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #248,079 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New Perspective, April 21, 2008

By 

Rachael K. Williams "LightLisha" (Buffalo, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sustainable Community: Learning from the Cohousing Model (Paperback)

This book was a great help to me as I search for varied information about cohousing. Although it is written from the perspective of a researcher, it has exstensive interviews with people from various cohousing communities around the world. The text features case studies of cohousing in the us, canada, new zealand, australia, and japan. the author also reports on interest in cohousing in korea and south africa.

unlike the most widely read books on cohousing, by mccamnt and durrett, this book is written from a far more international, progressive, and radical worldview. i am in the process of starting the feasibility phase for an affordable (i.e. low-income) cohousing community in Buffalo, NY and it is refreshing to see that cohousing is not just a hippie-bougie phenomena. in fact, meltzer contradicts the widely held belief that cohousing has clear-cut origins w/ the middle class in denmark, and offers evidence and comparisons of the cohousing that developed in the netherlands and sweden at or before the cohousing in denmark- with varying results, based in part on their more grassroots, working class, or feminist origins.

At the very least, this book offers all of the people considering or in the process of building a cohousing community, a new perspective, a wide range of ideas for design, environmental considerations, social considerations and composition, cocare practices in other communities, as well as economic factors, challenges, and solutions that have been achieved in places like berkeley cohousing, cohousing cooperative in New Zealand, and quayside village- just to name a few.

at the most, it is an inspiration to those of us w/o equity, friends in high-places, the ability to afford private workshops, or the abilities or our health- b/c here you have specific case studies of communities around the world that have built and designed their own communities with the same resources and challenges as we are working with.

read this book- cohousing really doesn't have to be another form of gated community.