Cohousing, community and codesign

What makes for good community? And how does the design of an area influence this? Cohousing communities address this exact question.

Cohousing is defined as intentional communities, realised through a model where the residents are the decision makers from the outset of a development, and decisions are often based on consensus. Often, the genesis of the community exists long before the houses are built, and then expands throughout the design and construction process, to include every resident.

In cohousing schemes, each household has a self-contained, private home as well as shared community space, with the ambition of finding a balance between community and privacy. This can take the shape of shared resources – laundry rooms, visitor facilities; shared activities – cooking and eating together, gardening; and shared responsibilities – governance. These shared touchpoints in others lives bring people together, and anecdotal evidence reports strong communities that support each other through many stages of life. As a concept, cohousing has been widely adopted in Scandinavia, the USA and Australia, but there are now a growing number of cohousing developments in the UK. These groups have come to cohousing from different needs and ambitions, and signpost that cohousing is a powerful model that can be a solution to various housing needs.

Studying housing and community

We recently took part in a day long study visit to contrast , three very different developments, each with community at its heart: Marmalade Lane and Eddington, both in Cambridge, and The Cockaigne Houses at The Ryde in Hatfield. Our aim was to better understand the relationship between the developments and the communities, and to spark conversation and ideas about how to successfully design community into a development.

The tour was expertly led by Open City’s editorial director Merlin Fulcher, and included a tour by Frances Wright, resident and head of community partnering at TOWN as well as resident-led tours of  The Ryde, Hatfield by PRP (1963) hosted by resident and AHMM architect Michelle Price.

Marmalade Lane

Marmalade Lane is Cambridge’s first cohousing community, completed in 2019 to critical acclaim. It was designed by Mole Architects in collaboration with developers TOWN and Trivselhus working together with the future residents, to create a safe and welcoming environment that prioritises community connection and shared resources.

The development of 42 multigenerational homes is arranged around a pedestrianised lane, shared gardens, and a common house with a large kitchen, dining area and guest rooms for use by friends and family of the residents. The houses are well designed, built and are energy efficient.

Through the codesign process, original residents were able to input into materials – brick colour, doors, etc, and the variety of house sizes is conducive to a multigenerational community. Children who moved in at the beginning are becoming teenagers, and they will bring a new perspective to the community.

Marmalade Lane fits nicely into Cambridge’s residential streets. It is elegant, well-proportioned and highly desirable. In comparison to the neighbouring areas, it felt quieter, more spacious, as the streets weren’t given over to vehicles (all cars are kept to the periphery) and individual bin stores (these too are grouped together as a shared resource). Instead, there was space to linger, and space to play that was well observed and also well occupied. It felt safe to walk and cycle through the scheme and we were greeted by residents.

Eddington

Located close to Marmalade Lane in Cambridge’s Northwest Development is Eddington. It is a major development by the University of Cambridge which is ‘seeking to address the lack of affordable accommodation for its staff and students in the city’, creating a whole new neighbourhood. When complete, Eddington will be home to 3000 mixed tenure homes, accommodation for 2000 postgraduates, as well as academic and research facilities, schools, shops, health centres, a hotel, sports facilities, play spaces and a care village. Even at this scale, the development team have used community as one of the key tenets in its design. It has been designed in consultation with the local residents, and the express ambition of the University to develop a sustainable neighbourhood that will flourish into a series of interlinked communities.

We were interested to see how the idea of community was expressed at this scale. Eddington feels more typical of a new build development. The first residents moved in in 2013 and it will take time to settle into its identity as its own communities naturally form and it develops its own idiosyncrasies and personality.  However, we felt the community centre and sports and play spaces stand out as generous and usable – a genuine piece of placemaking that will support the formation of communities.

The Cockaigne Houses

The Cockaigne Houses on The Ryde in Hatfield was the first UK cohousing development. Developed for and by the Cockaigne Housing Group – a group of people who answered an ad in The Times – in the 1960s and designed by PRP architects, the ‘experiment in housing’ was inspired by communal housing projects in Scandinavia. The 28 houses are single storey ‘patio houses’ each with a private garden and connected by shared gardens. At one end of the shared garden is a tennis court, at the other the common house.  The residents still regularly gather at the Common House using it as a disco space, movie theatre, birthday spot or even just a yoga space, though the nursery set up by the original residents closed in 1993, as demographics changed.

The homes have been flexibly extended and adapted as their owners’ families have grown and moved on. The single level homes by design have lots of natural light, access to patios and gardens, wide doorways and high-quality natural materials. They are quite unlike their contemporary houses and it is beautiful to see how they have embraced multigenerational living.

We enjoyed seeing inside three very distinct homes, all part of the same original scheme, but adapted and developed in very different ways to suit the three owners particular needs. One had created an ode to the original features and retained nearly all aspects of the original plan, while others had infilled and adapted spaces to increase the footprint, storage or environmental performance, Contrasting the three properties taught us the importance of a robust structural layout, that can accept changes without compromising privacy, or the relation to outdoors.

Designing for Community

Codesign, and space for communal activities are the common threads between our three schemes. Codesign gives people agency – they are part of the process, rather than a passive consumer. The residents can see their ideas and priorities develop, and influence the design of a future place. The inclusion of a common house, community hall or shared space in a settlement goes back thousands of years, across cultures. The practice of eating together is common in cohousing schemes. It brings people of all ages together to find common ground and interests and in doing so wards off loneliness and isolation. Shared spaces in these schemes may also have allowed for smaller space standards – as key utilities are shared, but any space lost is more than made up for in shared experience.

Cohousing in the UK housing market

The three projects we visited are seeking to create communities of urban professionals without exorbitant rents for hard-to-find housing. But cohousing is also an opportunity to challenge the current housing market and provide homes within communities for any lifestyle. Existing projects in the UK tend to come about as the result of addressing a particular problem. How to provide truly affordable housing for the residents of Bridport, for example, or a vision of later life for a group of older single women in London, which didn’t involve sitting in a dayroom singing ‘it’s a long way to Tipperary’, or how to protect against the physical and social isolation of rural life.

Is a return to a more communal form of living the answer?  It may or may not be surprising to most, that while the ideological principles of co-housing are filled with good promises, the realisation of these developments from multiple scales are difficult to materialise. They rely on engaged communities, shared responsibilities, and strong and consistent governance. Those groups who survive the not inconsequential hurdles of finding land, raising funds and building their homes do seem to then thrive. Just look at the Cockaigne Houses, where some of the original residents are still incumbent, and many have been residents for 25 years or more.

Conclusion

Community, and the long worldview that comes with it is a valuable commodity. By looking at cohousing and other alternative housing models there is an opportunity to learn and take inspiration. Communities can be large and small, unified or made up of a network of interlinking groups and individuals. No housing scheme can be a perfect fit for every individual or group, but we can learn from those projects which do seek to bring people closer together. From our brief study of this handful of examples, we have an insight into the possible successes and failures and can use this knowledge to deliver homes that will help to nurture all kinds of communities in the future.

Interested in learning more about cohousing?  We went on this tour organised by Open City.  Or read more on the UK Cohousing Network.

Stevie Johnson and Alasdair Ben Dixon