Customer Reviews

Sustainable Community: Learning from the Cohousing Model

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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.