Lu Mueller-Kahl : Cohousing TED Talk breakdown

   As I continue down this saga of investigating and analyzing cohousing projects, I wanted to understand a more generalized overview of what these projects are, why they are, and what they are conceptually wanting to accomplish. I came across a very interesting insight when watching Lu Mueller-Kahl's TED talk about the concept when I was trying to wrap my head around just what cohousing was after a discussion in our community planning seminar. Lu claims that she grew up in Frankfurt and had lots of friends to come over to the house as a child, not for any fancy amenities or special toys, but because they had a large yard and were allowed to do what they wanted back there such as garden or even build forts. This was said to have developed a sense of community for the friend group, all of them being in close proximity and working towards the same [imagined]  goals every day. As she aged, she claims that within their household, they began to take in extended family and friends, creating a very full, nontraditional household. She claims that this began to feel more like a community where people would cook for, clean for, and perform tasks for the entire group, rather than just for themselves. This became the spark for her interest in creating this sort of dynamic at a larger scale.

    She criticizes current Western views of this sort of dynamic, as it has cultivated a culture that it is the only accepted way to live to get married, buy a house for the two of you, and only populate it further with their own offspring. Given the way that this is framed by her, I do begin to see the wasteful nature of this, and how it is damaging to the traditional way that humans lived for thousands of years. This leads to "cohousing" to being seen as a radical idea here, when it has been pretty much in practice for all cultures up until the industrial Revolution, and is still in practice without any name in much of the Eastern world [i.e. multigenerational housing].

    This is a possible contributor to the amount of unhappiness in Western culture. We are a culture that is increasingly isolated in one facet and totally connected digitally. This is a strange experiment in human psychology and is one that seems to empirically prove detrimental to us. We need a connection. We need a real connection. We are hardwired for it. Yu quoted a 2010 study that proved that the elderly have a 50%better survival rate when connected to people and that loneliness is a greater cause of death than drinking or smoking. Pretty crazy. Even crazier that we all must know this deep down, yet we still look at things like Cohousing, which really just takes us back to our cultural roots, as a crazy idea that is only for left-wing hippy nut jobs. If these communities can advertise nothing else to attract people, maybe they should advertise the empirical data proving that a close community is just about the healthiest thing one can do. The main takeaway is that this is no radical application, rather, it is a great way to begin to rethink not only the way that we plan communities but also the way that we begin to redo the dangerous changes to the way that we culturally conceive of community in general.

Link for consideration

https://www.ted.com/talks/lu_mueller_kaul_co_housing_what_s_old_is_new_again