For the past decade, the City of Seoul has supported social housing initiatives to create community-led housing – including cohousing. This has led to a rapid uptick in cohousing and many of these are small urban communities of 6-9 households. As an opportunity for homeownership in an expensive city, these homes are sought after. But their appeal has more to do with the sense of community and enrichment to daily life that can be found in these communities.
In the small nation of Belgium (12 million people in an area the size of the state of Maryland), a single developer has built more than 15 communities in the past 15 years and has another 8 in the works. Some of them are small (6-9 homes) and others are larger (18-30 homes), and all of them more compact and well-appointed than their American counterparts.
What lessons can we learn from these cohousing communities abroad? See how they took lessons from the US and applied them in different ways to adapt to their locales.
Architect Grace Kim has visited more than 120 cohousing communities around the globe – more than a dozen in Seoul and nine in Belgium. She will share many of those examples as well as her conclusions of how to incorporate their best practices to our projects.
Instructor: Grace Kim
Grace H. Kim, FAIA is an architect and co-founding principal of Schemata Workshop, a Seattle-based architectural practice with a keen focus on community, social equity and sustainability. Her firm works on projects that shape and guide regional growth – such as the Seattle Central Waterfront, affordable housing, and Equitable Transit Oriented Developments (eTOD), recreation and aquatics facilities, transit projects, and long-range planning. Her co-design process engages not only her client and consultants, but also the building occupants and surrounding community stakeholders that will be impacted by her projects.
Grace is also the founder and architect of Capitol Hill Urban Cohousing, a collaborative residential community which includes her street level office and a rooftop urban farm. She walks the talk of sustainability – leaving a small ecological footprint while incorporating holistic ideals of social and economic resilience into her daily life. She is an internationally recognized expert in cohousing – her TED talk on cohousing as an antidote for isolation has over 3M views. Grace has designed and completed many cohousing projects in the Pacific Northwest. She has consulted on many cohousing projects around the nation and been a resource for cohousing communities around the globe.
Grace provided 8-years of leadership on the Seattle Planning Commission and currently serves on the Vice President for the Housing Development Consortium Board of Directors – a non-profit organization that advocates for affordable housing in Seattle and King County. She also serves on the Professional Advisory Council for the Cohousing Association of the US.
Only logged in customers who have purchased this product may leave a review.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.