Co-housing

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Co-housing
More than a friendly cul de sac
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Benefits

• For RSLs
• For the wider community
• For the individual residents
• For Society

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Benefits to RSLs

• Sustainable Housing
• High quality homes and environments
• Inclusive communities

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Sustainable housing

• More opportunity for features which depend on
  more than one home
• More opportunity to actively engage residents
  with sustainability issues
• More opportunity for mutual support in achieving
  sustainability

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Inter generational mass Sustainable transport
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High quality homes and environments

• Personal space is more often collective space
• Crime is not an issue
• Resident input into design, development and
  maintenance of the environment
• Sufficient weight of numbers to have things which
  might not otherwise be possible

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The Veg garden collective and individual effort
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Inclusive communities

• A focal point for energy and activity
  internally and externally (culture, sport,
  active citizenship)?
• Exposure of young people to wide range of adults
  (and vice versa) associated opportunities,
  support and informal supervision
• Attract additional resources
• Create economic activity

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CP FM.
Culture, skills, access to resources
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Benefits to the wider community

• Energy spills over
• Wider community can take part in locally
  organised activities
• Wider community benefits from empowerment and
  access to resources
• And wider community/society share the benefits of
  the individual

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Laughton has the only youth parish council in the
county
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Benefits to the individual

• Children are seen to be more articulate and more
  confident
• Skill sharing
• Stuff sharing
• Support in the day to day and in the big things
• Economic opportunities
• Support in accessing new opportunities a
  learning community

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Sharing skills and stuff and mutual support
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Benefits to society

• There are good reasons for putting relationships
  at the core of effective public provision.
  Relationships are at the heart of what makes for
  a good life. Much of what we most value - love,
  friendship, trust, recognition, care - comes from
  relationships with family, friends and social
  networks. People grow up well and age well if
  they have supportive relationships. (Guardian 1
  July)?

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Radical public services innovation will only
come from a markedly different starting point.
The key will be to redesign services to enable
more mutual self-help, so that people can create
and sustain their own solutions. Enabling people
to come together to find their own, local
solutions should become one of the main goals of
public services. Services do a better job when
they leave behind stronger, supportive
relationships for people to draw on and so not
need a service. (Guardian 1 July 2009)?
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There are good reasons for putting relationships
at the core of effective public provision.
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The key to getting people to change their
behaviour - perhaps to stop smoking, take up
walking, or start recycling their waste - is
whether they know and respect other people who do
the same thing.(Guardian 1 July 2009)?
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Critical mass is important for changing behaviours
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In Britain's largely service economy, earning a
living turns on social skills, being able to
understand and respond to a client's need.
Innovation comes from our capacity to collaborate
creatively. In an innovation-driven, service
economy, basic social skills - how to listen,
understand and work together - are as important
as reading, writing and arithmetic
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Listening and collaborating are key 21st century
skills
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Conclusions

• Benefits of co-housing to all stakeholders can be
  summed up as the building of social capital
• Creating sustaining networks of relationships
  benefits all age groups and stages of life
• Social capital has benefits in terms of
  economics, care, education, culture, civic life
• The networks created by co-housing spill over
  into the wider community
• The intentionality of co-housing is key its not
  a random or lucky effect!

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People grow up well and age well if they have
supportive relationships
.