About Mueller Couhousing

     Mueller developed cohousing is located in Austin, TX., and of course, it is, Austin is known for being accepting of the weird, but I wonder if the success of the project for Austinites will bode well for the project typology being more accepted nationwide. The community's website says that the community is a mixed-income, mixed-use community that is an adaptive reuse project coming out of an abandoned airport. This site sat as a desolate 700 acres of blight on the Austin landscape for years before its reimagination into this communal development. This land site is three miles out of the downtown core of Austin, and it is planned for public transit, attempting to limit vehicular traffic with a focus on multimodal and pedestrian movement around the site. This follows tenets of New Urbanism which was gaining popularity around the time of the project's development.

    This project is probably a far less radical and easier-to-swallow example of cohousing, whereas the homes are all customizable, and follow an aesthetic far more comparable to a traditional American neighborhood than some other examples of cohousing. The development has common spaces both indoors and out to service things like group meals, group exercise, and communal events. The project also includes lots of amenities for outdoorsy patrons with thirteen miles of hike and bike infrastructure, 140 acres of parkland, and nine uniquely designed and programmed parks within that acreage. 

   One of the things that makes this a little less of a "purist" version of this sort of development is its mixed-use component that houses corporate retailers and businesses. While this is not something that landscape architects like myself would be overjoyed and excited about, it does serve its contextual constituents. Americans love to consume, and the pedestrian access to these sorts of places is a big pull into the community for people. If this is what gets American people to gather and be okay with closer community planning, so be it.

    The community allows for the renting of plots for gardening at $30 per plot per person. There are 132 4'x8' plots available. This is a sort of disappointing variant of cohousing projects that have gardening work built into the communal guidelines, but it follows this "Americanized" version of cohousing. Again, so be it.

    Associated with the pedestrian infrastructure, the project is lined with a greenway park that pays homage to the Blackland Prairie ecoregion of Texas in which it sits. this system allows for pollinators and ecology to take over portions of the project promoting an overall better ecosystem than other communities that do not take into account any sustainable efforts in their initial planning for the sake of efficiency. Concluding thoughts on this project are that it is not nearly as divergent or exciting as some European examples of cohousing, but it is a step in the right direction for American community planning, especially in the South.

 

Links for consideration

https://muelleraustin.com/

http://www.muelleraustinonline.com/default.php

http://www.muelleraustinonline.com/default.php