Seeking a Better Way of Living in Co-housing

Sort of but not exactly. Meeting your neighbors can only go so far.

I am connected to a co-housing community in my city. There is a street of houses with their backs joined. They removed the fences separating their backyards; creating an enormous community space with communal gardens, common areas, and a common house for parties, gatherings and community dinners. It is very easy to knock on their door and stop in. It is also very easy to meet everyone in the community because of the interconnectedness. Everyone in the community chooses to be part of the community and are therefore glad to help out, chat, or hangout.

Essentially, the advantages are that you don't have to make as much of an effort to meet your neighbors. You are already interconnected and the infrastructure is there to support everyones needs. There are also aspects of sustainability that add to the benefits.

While true, the fact is that our habitats are social systems which encourage or discourage interaction, in different ways.

For example, in my years living in several cooperative houses in Austin (http://iccaustin.coop/) I noticed an interesting difference between the houses which were (subjectively) socially successful or unsuccessful: those which, by nature of their architecture, required one to pass through the common areas in order to reach one's room were much more successful than those whose common areas could be easily circumnavigated.

The theory being that random occasional traffic through a place naturally results in random encounters, and the building up of those encounters into more meaningful bonds is simply a matter of time and coincidence. For example, an existing discussion in the living room can attract passer-bys where that discussion becomes the germ of new friendships.

If one never has the occasion of coinciding with the others, even if they would get along swimmingly, they likely never would know it. Likewise, polite neighbors may find they have many more commonalities than they know, if only they had the opportunity to discover them.

Problem is that sometimes your neighbors are not the nicest people.