Housing – Shareable and Liveable

Guardian Article,16 Feb 2015: Co-housing: ‘it makes sense for people with things in common to live together’

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Schemes like this have been an established option in parts of mainland Europe since the 1970s – there are 200 senior co-housing schemes in the Netherlands alone, according to the UK Co-housing Network – but no one has successfully imported the model to the Britain – until now. When Ratcliffe and the other members of the Older Women’s Co-housing group (Owch) move into their properties next year, they will become Britain’s first co-housing scheme specifically designed for and by older people.

It is an option that the charity Age UK would like to see available much more widely to people moving into old age, according to policy adviser Joe Oldman. “We think it makes sense, especially for people who are friends or have things in common, to be able to come together and to support each other. We think [co-housing] could have a really important role.””

The whole article may be found here- http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/16/co-housing-people-things-common-live-together-older-people

5 WAYS TO ADD DENSITY WITHOUT BUILDING HIGH-RISES… AND THE FIFTH ONE IS SHARED URBAN AMENITIES

The thing is, high-rises aren’t the first thing cities should look to if they want to densify. There are a lot of options that can add to, not take away, from its organic vibrancy and sense of community. Counterintuitively, densification can be isolating rather than connecting. You’d think that adding more people to a smaller place would automatically mean more social cohesion. But high-rises have the exact opposite effect. Piling people into tall buildings separates them from the street and from each other, creating silos of isolated people looking at other people from a distance. It doesn’t have to be that way. Cities don’s have to be isolating. There are ways to add density and at the same time build community.

To see the article, go here: http://bloomingrock.com/2015/02/02/5-ways-to-add-density-without-building-high-rises/

Sharing Cities Briefing by Friends of the Earth

Agyeman et al. (2013). Sharing cities

This paper highlights the importance of the shared public realm in the history and development, and more recently, in the re-imagining of politics. We argue that the neoliberal, hegemonic model of development in the modern world prioritises private interests at the cost of shared interests. Instead, we suggest that a cultural rebalancing is overdue: one that gives much greater recognition and credit to the shared public realm in our cities (both physical and metaphorical); one that supports a revival of ‘conventional’ sharing – namely of the city as a whole as shared space – as well as a blossoming of novel forms of sharing; and one that recognises and affirms the ways in which the opportunities afforded to individuals in cities are founded on the collective efforts and actions of whole communities.

To demonstrate the opportunity in sharing, after a brief consideration of the historical roots and development of sharing, this paper explores four key questions:

what is currently – or could be – shared;
why is sharing desirable;
what enables and drives sharing; and
what opportunities are there to both enhance sharing and overcome barriers to it?

The Times newspaper article about sharing from Chris Rogers

O brave new world that has such sites in it