Cohousing
Private self-contained homes clustered around shared facilities — usually a common house — with residents managing the whole.
This is a word people use loosely, so check it against what is actually held in common: land, income, decisions, or only good will. Communities that use the term precisely will tell you, unprompted, which of those they share and which they do not.
Cohousing is an architecture before it is anything else: private, self-contained homes — each with its own kitchen and bathroom — clustered around shared facilities that the residents own and run together. The shared part almost always includes a common house with a large kitchen and dining room, and often a laundry, workshop, and guest rooms that individual homes are built small enough to do without.
Four features recur across almost every project that calls itself cohousing: residents participate in the design, the site is laid out to make encounter likely (cars parked at the edge, front doors facing a shared path), facilities are genuinely shared rather than merely communal-looking, and the community manages itself with no external landlord or provider.
What it does not require
Shared income. Shared politics. Shared meals, even — most communities eat together two or three times a week, and attendance is optional. Cohousing is deliberately thin on ideology, which is exactly why it is the easiest form for people with conventional jobs and mortgages to join.
An example
The form began in Denmark in the early 1970s — bofællesskab, “living community” — with Sættedammen, near Hillerød, generally cited as the first. It reached English-speaking countries largely through Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett, whose 1988 book gave the model its English name. Typical projects run to twenty or forty households, a size chosen deliberately: large enough that the common house is busy, small enough that everyone knows everyone.
What it is often confused with
An ecovillage , most of all. The two are not alternatives on the same axis: cohousing describes the architecture and ownership, an ecovillage describes the purpose. Plenty of ecovillages are built as cohousing, and plenty of cohousing has no ecological ambition at all. Confusing them is common enough that we wrote a page on it.
Sources & further reading
- 1 Cohousing vs ecovillage — the two told apart properly
Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked. How this is written
Related terms
A group who chose each other, live together or close by, and have written down how they decide things.
A community consciously designing its social, ecological, economic and cultural systems to regenerate the place it sits in.