We Built a Village: Cohousing and the Commons

Description:

Describes the development of one of the first cohousing communities in the U.S. offering a social understanding of its commons.

Cohousing, a form of communal living that clusters around shared common space, began about a half century ago in Denmark. We Built a Village describes the process of planning and building of an early cohousing community in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the way the people involved simultaneously built their homes and their social structure.

As both a memoir and a sociological analysis that probes the differences between commons and markets, it is unique among books about cohousing. When this group of people began in the late 1990s to construct their cohousing community, they set in motion a counterpoint between the physical spaces and the social configurations that would guide their lives together, even up to creative responses to the recent pandemic.

Brief description: Diane Margolis is a founding member of Cambridge Cohousing where she has lived for more than twenty years. She is a former member of the Coho/US Board of Directors and co-founder and Director Emeritus of the Cohousing Research Network. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study 1980-1981. She has published many research articles, and her books include The Fabric of Self, which won Honorable Mention at the First Annual Book Award of the Eastern Sociological Society. She is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Connecticut.

Review Quotes: "

"The Diane Margolis' rendition of cohousing is a very human one, and overdue. Putting together
a custom high-functioning neighborhood is never simple, and this book does not shy away from
the complexities. But getting these communities together is getting easier--the foibles are fewer
because of stories like this--and one day cohousing will be the norm, not the exception."