Heartwood Cohousing, a Sustainable Community

The next stop in the investigation of cohousing projects that work within América takes me to the Heartwood community  just outside of Durango, Colorado. This development sits on a hilly three hundred and sixty one acres full of meadows surrounded by evergreen forests. The project, like most other cohousing projects, follows new urbanist tenets such as strictly having pedestrian infrastructure within the developed area with vehicular access only available at select locations along the perimeter. This, by design, forces interaction and encounter between residents and visitors. Tenets describe the community as "safe and comfortable".

The project had been planned and fought for with policy makers for more than a decade before it was able to be developed, but in the year 2000, the community was finally able to begin being populated by residents. These residents were met with a haven of slow, quiet, and engageable spaces throughout, and communal engagement opportunities such as drum circles, theater, and yoga classes began to organically take root, eventually becoming solidified ritual for the residents to expect. While not required, the community expectation is that each resident will contribute to meals, landscaping, and general maintenance of and for the community as a whole. The community is an internal democracy, allowing for residents to have their voices heard in order to develop this young community into the most equitable and enjoyable space for all.

The community seeks to create a lively and omni-engaged environment within the open and connective spaces throughout the grounds, but privacy and quiet is always able to be found in the vast system of hiking trails located all along the periphery of the project. One of the main community gathering points within the project are the organic gardens, these are irrigated with a combination of collected water supplemented with taps. These gardens produce much of the materials in which the community is fed with at group meals. They focus heavily on sustainability, with the implementation of large scale solar power collectors, smart water practices, and practicing minimal ecological disturbance in order to keep habitat for animals such as black bears, deer, elk, pumas, and a litany of native insects and birds. If for nothing else, the embodied energy saved with an entire community subsisting mostly internally in regard to food without the need to buy into monocultural agriculture. This community seems to be an incredible one, and a shining example of what American cohousing can be.

Links to consider

https://www.heartwoodcohousing.com/about-cohousing.html

https://goodanthropocenes.net/heartwood-cohousing/