Origins
There are precedents for cohousing with the Siheyuan, or quadrangle design of housing in China which has a shared courtyard and is thus similar in some respects to cohousing. Unlike the utopian movement in 18th and 19th century, the three villages of Arden, Ardentown, and Ardencroft, Delaware founded at the turn of the 20th century[31] as well as Bryn Gweled Homesteads founded in 1940 in Southampton, Pennsylvania incorporate private homes on commonly owned land while promoting cooperative values. These cohousing communities were established in part based on Henry George’s single-tax theory. In the 1920s in New York, the rise of cooperative apartment housing, which now make up over 70% of all homes in Manhattan, similarly incorporate shared facilities, self government and greater social interaction but rarely include prospective residents participation in the design process nor the intentionality of current cohousing. Swedish social scientists and architects advanced common space coupled with private homes, followed by the modernists in the 1930's-'50's who spurred the building of many cohousing communities,[32] such as Marieberg[33] in Stockholm.
Distinct from communal living experiments associated with the hippie movement,[15] the modern application of cohousing developed in Denmark in the 1960s among groups of families who were dissatisfied with existing housing and communities that they felt did not meet their needs, particularly in respect to work-life balance.[34] Bodil Graae wrote a newspaper article titled "Children Should Have One Hundred Parents",[35] spurring a group of 50 families to organize around a community project in 1967. This group split into two groups who developed the cohousing projects Sættedammen and Skråplanet, which are among the oldest known modern cohousing communities. The key organizer was Jan Gudmand Høyer who drew inspiration from his architectural studies at Harvard and interaction with experimental U.S. communities of the era. He published the article "The Missing Link between Utopia and the Dated Single Family House"[36] in 1968, converging a second group.
Self-governing cohousing communities, such as Sharingwood in Washington, N Street in California, Ecovillage at Ithaca and Cantines Island both in New York were built in the '80's and '90's with cooperatively owned space and a social structure that encourages supportive interactions, balanced with privately owned homes, as collaborative alternatives to typical American subdivisions. The Danish term bofællesskab (living community) was promoted in North America as cohousing by two American architects, Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett, who visited several cohousing communities and wrote about what they learned in books with the aim of advancing cohousing development.[11] Building on the success of a few earlier, established cohousing developments, the first community in the United States to be designed, constructed and occupied as cohousing by the McCamant Durrett team is Muir Commons in Davis, California in 1991.[37][38] In the following decades, their vision[39] of cohousing has become dominant, while communities such as the Hundredfold Farm in Pennsylvania and Genesee Gardens in Michigan represent more expansive models of how families join to form cohousing communities.
