Reviews…
Small is necessary
An updated review of Anitra Nielsen’s 2018 book on eco-collaborative housing.
I LAST SAW her in a cafe in Denpasar. When was that? Twenty-five years ago? Must be. She was sitting over on the far side, her coffee on the table in front of her. She looked over, wondering why this person, me, was looking over at her. Then we recognised each other.
Now, here we were looking at each other over another table. Occasionally, she would glance at me in that way people do when they are trying to remember a face from long ago. And it was long ago, those twenty-five years. Now, here she was, the facilitator of the twenty or so people who succeeding in navigating the convoluted passages of the UTS Architecture faculty building in search of the launch of the book, Small Is Necessary.
The woman I last saw in that Denpasar cafe is now associated with RMIT University in Melbourne. I knew Ariel Salleh’s daughter, Anna, when we attended the University of Technology Sydney as journalism students. Anna works down the road in the ABC’s science department and follows her other vocation, music.
A timely book in a time of housing crisis
Small Is Necessary is a timely book. That was less-so when it was published in the Janaury of 2018. It is more-so now that the nation is beset by a housing crisis. The crisis is a nasty mashup of dramatically increasing rental costs, dramatically-rising house prices and a housing supply shortfall resulting in the demand-driven price and rent increases.
Government is aware of the accommodation cost bubble and of the reality that younger buyers are forced out of the housing market, and that those who manage to get a foothold face decades of mortgage debt. There are few, if any, solutions coming from government or financial institutions. Anitra’s book has no solutions at governmental level, yet in discussing a range of collaborative housing models the book might be of some help.
Intentional community — a brief excursion
Let’s take a short diversion into definitions and history to learn that intentional communities were a core element of a social movement of the 1970s when they manifested the constructive energy coming out of the social ferment of those years, ferment that started in the latter half of the preceding decade. The communities pioneered rural land-sharing settlements and in doing so paved the way for today’s ecovillages.
Ecovillages are the modern rendering of the rural intentional community. The first in the world made its start in the 1980s when people from the Sydney permaculture scene and others set up Crystal Waters Permaculture Village in the Sunshine Coast hinterland of south-east Queensland. The number has grown.
According to Anitra, there is a strong link between intentional communities and what we still quaintly call ‘alternative technology’ although it is now mainstream renewable energy and other technologies. It was on those rural land sharing communities that residents tinkered with and prototyped those technologies.
We can think of cohousing as an urban adaptation of intentional community/ecovillage living. It is a Scandinavian model of medium density community located in urban areas. Residents share facilities such as the laundry and in some cohousing residents meet weekly or more for shared cooking and meals in a community dining room. Hobart’s Cascade Cohousing was Australia’s first, and now there are more. Whether cohousing will provide more-affordable housing is something we wait to see.
Shared households were another product of the times and continue to be temporary home for many and not only to students. The most successful shared household I know of is Selli-Hoo in Black Forest, a leafy suburb between Adelaide CBD and the Spencers Gulf coast in South Australia. Started in the 1970s, the household is home to those who bought a share in it as well as a couple renters for whom rooms are set aside. Renting is a way for prospective shareholders to see if communal living really is for them. Outside this large, car-free house, bicycles hang from a grape-covered pergola, vegetables and fruit trees grow in what was once the driveway in Adelaide’s hot summer sun. Chooks roam their enclosure.
Rural ecovillages, urban cohousing and sharehouses are different forms of intentional community.
The activist-scholar and the value of participatory research
Anitra Nelson is a slightly-built woman perhaps in her late sixties. She is not what anyone would call tall, her grey hair cut short, her skin tanned by exposure to the elements, her manner relaxed and confident, her speech calm and considered, her mind sharp.
Anitra spent a decade living on an intentional community and in other shared living arrangements. She is familiar with collaborative housing and the culture of those who inhabit it. Her research took her to Europe and the US where, in New York, she spent three months living in an urban community. All of that is just as well because her book, Small Is Necessary, documents her research into what she calls ‘eco-collaborative housing’. That includes not only intentional land-sharing communities but shared households, cohousing and ecovillages.
Anitra describes herself as an activist-scholar. Now living in Castlemaine in central Victoria, she is affiliated with the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University in Melbourne. She co-edited Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies that was published in 2011, and coedited Housing for Degrowth: Principles, Models, Challenges and Opportunities.
The session at the UTS that evening in 2018 took the form of Anitra delivering a short talk on her research followed by a response to questions by Bronwen Morgan, Professor of Law at UNSW who was researching the legal and regulatory pathways for new economy initiatives and who is a member of the Australian Earth Laws Alliance and the New Economy Network Australia. Cameron Tonkinwise, Professor of Interdisciplinary Design at University of Technology Sydney, where he researches design-enabled change for sustainable societies, also asked questions.
Anitra explained that eco-collaborative housing can produce a level of community sufficiency in not only accommodation but in food and healthcare. Community-based and with shared governance, the different forms the communities take are, essentially, versions of residential co-operatives. They might be land-sharing communities, they might take the compact, medium density form of cohousing or they might be communities in higher-rise buildings. Hearing this, I was reminded of the Institute for Cultural Affairs, some of whose members in the 1980s bought and lived in a vertical community, a 1960s three-level walk-up apartment block they owned in inner urban Marrickville. Cameron likened these initiatives to ‘politics by design’—the design of infrastructure that influences human behaviour.
In Germany, the national government supports collaborative forms of housing. What we need in Australia, Bronwen Morgan said, is financial change to enable people to more easily access collaborative housing.
Anitra believes that a delicate balance needs to be achieved between disconnecting collaborative housing from the market while retaining some market connection. It is important to design entry and exit structures. This enables people to sell their dwelling and move on. Also important is a mix of ownership and tenancy. Tenancy allows prospective entrants to try before they buy.
A good idea for seniors
It was from Robyn Francis that I first encountered the idea. Robyn is an elder of the permaculture movement who has taught the design system for decades and since the mid-1990s from her Djanbung Gardens education centre on the edge of Nimbin in northern NSW’s humid subtropics.
We were sitting in her mudbrick classroom one afternoon in what must have been… what?… 2000, 2001? I don’t recall what we were talking about but the topic moved on to the intentional communities that made their start in the region with Tuntable Falls community in 1973.
Robyn said that there are all these “aging hippies” out there in the hills. To provide easier access to services in town as they age, these pioneers of the back-to-the-land movement would benefit from living in an ecovillage on the edge of town. Her words conjured the image of a hippie retirement village. The idea was discussed at the April 2018 Australasian Permaculture Convergence in Canberra where a contact list of interested people was started. Nothing more was heard of it.
In Bronwen Morgan’s discussion with Anitra, the idea came up in the analogous form of cohousing for seniors being a better alternative than the conventional retirement village. Two people in the audience, one an architect, intervened to say they are currently working on just this type of project. It is in its early stages. The idea is for a cohousing community in Sydney’s Inner West, perhaps something like an apartment building where people can live independently as they age and where they share some facilities and support each other. It seemed a reprise of the Institute for Cultural Affair’s apartment block community of the 1980s.
They also talked about a network of people, activities and services that, according to the brochure they distributed, would “wrap around” older people living in their existing homes and create connections to the larger community. Appropriately, they call their proposal the AGEncy Project, ‘agency’ being defined as “the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices”.
Are there collaborative solutions to the housing crisis out there?
In the big cities, the big backyard in which homeowners can gain a measure of self-provisioning in food are fast becoming a relic of Australia’s past. They exist mainly in the middle-ring suburbs and rural towns but they are far from safe there. Urban infill housing and large-scale apartment development are eating up the nation’s suburban backyards. As for the new tract housing on the urban fringe, that offers big houses on tiny lots with the detached houses often built so close together it resembles more a sprawling medium density development and less traditional suburbia.
Anitra’s book offers a mixed appreciation of the potential of apartment dwelling. She looks at badly built, too-small and lightless apartments as well as discussing better-designed apartments. I’ve seen apartments of modest scale with open space around them as a solution to the sprawl and private vehicle reliance that detached suburban housing brings. A friend, a planner with experience of German multi-unit dwellings, told me that the optimal maximum height for an apartment block is that from the top of which you can recognise a familiar face in the street below. That works out at a maximum of five or six stories. An apartment block of that height can house a lot more people than the space they would sprawl over with detached dwellings.
As Anitra says, despite conserving urban space the environmental impact of apartment living is contingent not only on the design and fittings of the building but on the consumerism of its occupants. When living in Sydney my partner and I lived in a block of four apartments and we found the experience a positive one. The residents were friendly and cooperative, we had a large backyard and a garden with ornamentals, vegetables and young fruit trees. Before we left there was discussion of rain water tanks. Close to the beach and a few minutes from the bus stop, after our old car died we didn’t get a new vehicle, joining the car-share for the times we might need a vehicle. It had six different types of vehicles parked nearby. With the car-share, public transport and a walkable suburb mainly of modest-scale apartment buildings and duplexes, private transport was not the necessity it is in the suburbs. Most of our food was home-delivered by a food hub that sourced much of their produce from farmers in the greater Sydney region. The rest we obtained from the local shopping strip after a ten minute walk. The design and lifestyle basis for compact, environmentally sustainable and higher density urban living was there. Just add photovoltaics and solar hot water.
Another potential solution is neighbourly and cooperative, compact and shared. That is cohousing. With its small footprint and medium density design it makes best use of costly urban land. It is potentially cheaper to buy into, however that is not guaranteed and in the instance of one cohousing dwelling on sale a few years ago, the asking price was as high as than that of detached dwellings in the neighbourhood. Whether this was due to the perception that cooperative housing made for a better living environment I don’t know. If so, we can see how the perception could increase demand for cohousing and drive up prices, making it an option for only the wealthy.
With urban sprawl paving our city-fringe market gardens and orchards, and in doing so reducing our urban food security, and with 30 percent of the average households’ income spent on mortgage repayments, cohousing seems the ideal model for urban housing of it can be made affordable.
So it is with other forms of collaborative accommodation. The rural ecovillage model is not viable in the cities because of its extensive land area and the high cost of urban land. What might be the fix for our cities, where public transport and open space infrastructure scramble to keep pace with city-fringe housing development and the densification of population brought by the boom in apartment building, are apartment buildings of six or so levels as a form of vertical cohousing or collaborative housing.
Clearly, we need a better approach to housing. To popularise these more appropriate forms of urban residential, Bronwen said it would be necessary to create buzz around the idea of collaborative housing. That happened in the mid-teens of this century around what was purported to be the new idea of the tiny house. Tiny houses are individual, not collaborative housing. The buzz that accompanied them created a surge of interest and a small-scale social movement that positioned them as a type of affordable housing. Tiny houses are portrayed as not only more affordable than what the housing market offers but are sometimes portrayed in countercultural terms as the minimalist remedy for the consumerism associated with conventional housing. They take Mies van der Rohe’s ‘less is more’ into new territory.
Tiny houses only suit singles or couples. The social movement that grew around them failed to acknowledge the fact that they were not something new even though that was the notion being put out. Someone I knew lived in what could properly be described as a tiny house in an ecovillage. That was built before the idea of the tiny house was invented. Would the shack I lived in be classified as a tiny house? Why not? It met the criteria. Then there are people who live in ther vans. Surely they, too, are tiny homes.
One version of the tiny house is more or less a wheeled, mobile elaboration of the traditional caravan. Yet, that is nothing new either. People without the financial resources to buy a house have lived in caravans for decades. That, though come. not from choice as does those building their mobile tiny homes but from financial necessity.
Tiny houses face local government legislative hurdles because many councils see them as temporary housing, like caravans. In today’s housing crisis there is a valid justification to regard caravans as permanent housing too.
Whatever form it takes, collaborative housing long ago lost its hippie image. That was an artifact of its pioneering days, the time when dissatisfied youth set forth from the cities for new lives on new settlements. They called themselves the ‘back to the land’ movement for a good reason.
Collaborative housing is now mainstream. The number of examples is growing in Australia. Overseas, the model is taking off and as Scandinavia’s cohousing it has been around for decades.
As a modern version of the sharehouse for both renters and owner-occupiers, as cohousing that blends private life with communal, as city apartment blocks jointly purchased and run as a housing cooperative, as rural ecovillages the modern evolution of the intentional communities of the seventies… collaborate housing takes different forms. They are all possibilities. They already exist but like so many solutions they are scattered and can be hard to find. Back in the early years of the present century, a Sydney woman, a real estate agent, set herself up to sell properties developed by practitioners of the permaculture design system and others that would interest her specialised market. She persisted for some years, however I don’t know what became of her enterprise. Still, it seems a market niche that someone could fill to make collaborative housing more accessible.
Authenticated by life experience
Anitra’s book is all the more authoritative because what she writes is informed by her lived experience.
This makes it fundamentally different to much academic research in which the researcher stands outside their topic looking in, lacking immersion in it. This, I realise, is a prerogative of the mature age researcher, someone for whom the years have afforded the life experience that allows immersion in their subject for participatory research. For this, Anitra’s work is all the more valuable and credible.
And so, to dinner
After the launch, Fiona Campbell, a local government sustainability educator and permaculture teacher, and I joined Ariel and Anitra for a meal in a small Malaysian cafe on Harris Street. Ariel said we had “done much in permaculture in Sydney”. I always feel a little reticent when people say things like that but I know that is a silly reaction to a complement.
As we walked down Harris Street the conversation turned to permaculture. Anitra said that just last week she had done an advanced permaculture design course with David Holmgren and Dan Palmer. Anitra also told us how in the 1970s she tutored in psychology at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. She remembers this mature age student who joined her class. He was a Tasmanian, a man by the name of Bill Mollison. Late in that decade Bill went on to co-invent permaculture.
Dinner with a woman who taught Bill Mollison seemed a fitting end to an evening of conversation around an idea, collaborative housing, some of whose early practitioners had much to do with the birth of the permaculture design system.
