Interested in Brooklyn "Cohousing"?
If you're interested in the concept called cohousing--which is a cooperative living arrangement--you can learn more about plans for cohousing in Brooklyn tonight. The meeting is organized by the Brooklyn Cohousing Group. Here's some info about it:
A successful reality in Denmark and now in more than 100 locations in the US & Canada, cohousing offers a contemporary model for creating a secure and stimulating environment for families and individuals. In urban cohousing, people live in individual apartments but mingle in common courtyards, gardens and dining facilities. The Brooklyn Cohousing Group is currently recruiting smart, creative, and community-minded people to locate, finance, design and build a community for 20 to 30 households. As the first co-housing community in New York we hope to embody what is best about being New Yorkers. We are a child-friendly, multi-generational group open to all ages, races, religions, ethnicities and household types...The meeting is tonight at 6PM at 399 Atlantic Avenue.
We want an apartment building with a central courtyard where children play and neighbors gather, friends talk and people sing, and where plants, trees, vegetables and flowers grow. We currently believe that a mix of 20-30 apartments of various sizes is ideal and we intend to build or modify an apartment building to house a community of this size. We are committed to doing so in Brooklyn within 2 years (by the fall of 2009). We aim to locate within walking distance of Prospect Park, in an area with good public schools, near to public transportation and shopping and services. We value the environment and will include ecologically-friendly technologies where economically feasible. We will design a beautiful building and invest in quality construction to create homes we will be proud to live in for a long time.
Labels: Affordable Housing
posted by rsguskind at 7:55 AM
3 Comments:
I would love to see it happen, perhaps with a garden that yields greens for the whole building, maintained by residents like a community garden...?
I feel like a lot of developments have this type of vision in mind, and they feel like the communal courtyard is enough... and it never is.
i would be really interested in learning about what these visionaries have in mind. I come from an architecture/urban planning background and have lived in queens/brooklyn for over three years. i see lots of buildings with space designed for social activity, but nothing seems to really inspire people to really use it - especially in ways that might bring the building's "community" together.
Come visit some of the nearly -100 cohousing neighborhoods around the U.S. and you'll see common spaces that actually get used: for common meals a few times a week, for gardening, for hanging out together, movie nights, games, childcare, and an increasing array of mutual support and engagement. It's both the design (maintaining privacy while providing sightlines and a progression of gradually-more-public spaces) and the social element, recruiting people actually interested in that degree of connection, who appreciate the benefits of knowing their neighbors.
I'll be visiting Brooklyn in late Dec./early January and hope to do some kind of public event sharing experiences from living in two different cohousing neighborhoods since 2000 and visiting 75.
Raines Cohen, Cohousing Coach
Hi, we just published a documentary on the cohousing phenomenon. It won an award at the 34th Ekotopfilm festival 2007 and was designed to show what is cohousing "from within" as a complement to the existing books.
The trailer can be watched at http://notsocrazy.net/video.html
Enjoy!
Matthieu
Director of "Voices of Cohousing"
Post a Comment
<< Home