Co-housing got its firm roots from early communities in Denmark and kibbutzim. The word kibbutz is Hebrew and means gathering or clustering. A kibbutz is a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture1. The first kibbutzim were formed by Jewish people in search of an ease from the normal lives. The following is summarized information from a lecture given by Dr. Shpancer who lived on Kibbutz Nachson for his childhood. The founders of Kibbutz Nachson moved out to hillside in order to fight poverty and raise their children in a healthy environment. They started farming in order to become self sufficient. The first years of the kibbutz the families lived out of tents.
After establishment of the kibbutz they began to build houses and community buildings. The ideology of the kibbutz was that everyone put in their own work, each with their own specialty. The cooks cooked, the famers farmed, and the teachers taught. This allowed for more genuine work, but at the same time people chipped in were help was needed regardless if that was their specialty. They raised their children in a communal process, and it was not strictly left to the parents. They had designated people to take care of the children. The children lived in communal sleeping houses, which were filled with other children, then for a few hours each night they would visit with their parents. This allowed both parents more time to get work done without having to devote so much time to their children, especially the mothers. The feminist movement fell in the early years of the kibbutz, so the process of raising the children allowed for women to have more choice to work and not be restricted to child bearing2.
This way of raising children was found to be inefficient by later studies, and is no longer practiced in today’s kibbutzim. The idea, however, of having community involvement in the raising of children is present today in co-housing communities.
The most influential aspect of co-housing has always been children. In fact the first known and now oldest co-housing community Sættedammen, was founded by 50 families that were sparked by a newspaper article titled, “Children Should Have One Hundred Parents” by Bodil Graae who asked parents interested in forming a collective community to get in contact with her3. They settled in New Hammersholt with 27 residences, a large communal and common area. They put great importance on common eating which took place up to five times a week. A great deal of importance was placed on socializing within the community. This community has been the basis for many of today’s communities, built upon those founding principles of Sættedammen4.
All of these communities draw from certain aspects that are found in the literature of Thomas More’s Utopia. Thomas More’s imaginary island called Utopia was an extreme criticism of the times. There was ever present poverty and hunger. Utopia solved this by eliminating money and instituting universal food rations based on what you needed.5. Today’s communities main criticisms seem to be centralized around children and community, this can be found in the attention to their architecture, community layout, and community involvement.
