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= Village Cohousing Community = From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about Village Cohousing Community(VCC), the first cohousing community in Madison, Wisconsin, and built in 1999. Located at 1104 Mound Street, Madison, Wisconsin 53715, it is bordered by Mills, Mound, and St. James Streets. VCC consists of 18 private units ranging from newly constructed apartments, renovated older homes, one side by side duplex, and a common house with living units above. The units range in size from a studio apartment to a four bedroom house.

Cohousing integrates private spaces with shared spaces to create an intentional living community. The living units are self-contained and each have their own amenities, just like an apartment, flat or house, but shared spaces encourage community among neighbors. Unlike intentional communities that are often founded upon a way of life driven by strong ideological beliefs, cohousing is an approach to housing based on democratic ideals and a desire for a more pragmatic and social solutions to the complexity of modern living.

Characteristics
According to cohousing originators McCamant and Durrett, cohousing has four common characteristics: Chris Hanson, author of the Cohousing Handbook Building a Place for Community adds more:
 * 1) Participatory process - residents are responsible for the management needs of the community and make all decisions concerning the cohousing as a group. Also, residents participate through regularly scheduled meals, committee meetings, parties, events, and celebrations.
 * 2) Intentional neighborhood design - Although households have their own private lives and livelihoods, the physical design of cohousing encourages purposeful contact with neighbors and manifest in such things as informal child care, emergencies, elder care, socializing, sick care, committee work, transportation sharing among other things. The idea is to build a strong sense of community among residents.
 * 3) Extensive common facilities - Shared spaces can include a common house with a kitchen and dining room, playrooms, guest rooms, laundry facilities, tool sheds, and more. Outdoor spaces are also shared and/or people act as stewards for particular garden plots within the space. These spaces can include play equipment, a lawn or open area, parking, sandbox, outdoor eating area, and garden areas and walkways. Tools such as snowblowers, lawnmowers, and garden tools are typically shared.
 * 4) Complete resident management - Residents work cooperatively to manage the physical and legal requirements of the community through committee work, Committees are formed to oversee areas such as the landscape, the common house, conflict resolution, membership, accounting and record keeping, aging, social gatherings, and children. Some cohousing communities use a form of consensus and others use sociocracy.
 * 1) Ideal Community Size - this tends to be between 12 and 36 units. Below or above these numbers can become too burdensome or too complex.
 * 2) Separation from cars - people rather than cars are privileged in the design, so cars are parked away from the central living areas.
 * 3) Shared dinners - a shared feature among cohousing groups, the fellowship of sharing food happens on a regular basis among residents during the week.
 * 4) Variation in responsibility for design development - this varies among groups, some maintaining control over development processes and others simply purchasing the finished living arrangement.

Village Cohousing Community Origins
When Design Coalition offered a series of workshops on cohousing in the Madison area in 1991, a group of participants formed and named their project Village Cohousing Community. Thereafter, they dedicated themselves to building an intergenerational cohousing community that included children and families. The core group met on a regular basis, and eventually found a suitable property in the heart of Greenbush neighborhood, near UW-Madison and downtown. It consisted of a group of 5 houses sold as a package, but for the project, three houses had to be demolished to make way for a nine-unit building, the duplex, and the common house. Architect Lou Host Jablonski was hired from Design Coalition to design the cohousing community, and in partnership with him, the design for VCC was made. It used a condominium structure, but some rental units and affordable housing were also included in the original legal structure. When it was finished in the fall of 1999, residents began to move in and the community was born. Since then, no significant physical alterations have been made, but the residents change over occasionally due to employment, education, and life changes.

Brief History of Cohousing
The idea for cohousing originated in Denmark, initiated by the writings of two people, who according to Sargisson (2012) were at ideological odds with one another: Bodil Graae wrote from a feminist perspective in protest of the nuclear family, whereas Jan Gudmand-Høyer "sought to realize a different society" based on communitarian ideals (p. 32). In the end, both had to compromise in order to get a community built. Graae wrote, "Children Should Have One Hundred Parents", in the Danish newspaper, Politiken, in 1967. A group of families joined her and together they developed the first Danish cohousing, ,Sættedammen built in 1972. Jan Gudmand-Høyer attempted to create a community in 1964 but was prevented by neighbors who were opposed to the project. He wrote an article in 1968 called "The Missing Link between Utopia and the Dated One-Family House" and went on to build over 40 cohousing projects in Denmark during his lifetime. This form of housing is what is called bofællesskab, in Danish, or "living community", and is what inspired American architects, Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durret, to develop and coin the term "cohousing" in the U.S. context. Their book, Cohousing; A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves (1994), is what inspired many people across the U.S. to create cohousing communities.