Description
By what means are senior cohousing communities prepared for, launched, sailed, landed, and settled successfully. Specifically, we’ll discuss how to start a “Study Group 1” Aging Successfully in Senior Cohousing working group. We believe that raising awareness and consciousness around senior cohousing is one of the best ways to get it built. The Danes would say, if you asked 100 seniors, “Would you consider living in senior cohousing?” maybe one would say yes. But if you asked 100 seniors after taking SG1, 40 would say yes! We like this ratio, and have found it proves out in the U.S. as well.
Speaker: Charles Durrett
Charles Durrett is an architect, author, and advocate of affordable, socially responsible and sustainable design. He has made major contributions to community-based architecture and cohousing. Charles has designed over 50 cohousing communities in North America and has consulted on many more around the world. He also designed an equal number of affordable housing projects. He is the principal architect at The Cohousing Company, based in Nevada City, California. His work has been featured in Time Magazine, New York Time, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Architecture, Architectural Record, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and a wide variety of other publications, as well as the MacNeil/Lehrer Report, the Today Show, and dozens of other national TV shows. In addition to numerous awards for his contributions to cohousing and community-based architecture, such as the Human Habitat award presented by the United Nations, he has given many public presentations, including two to the U.S. Congress and The Commonwealth Club of California, and scores of universities. He continues to devote his time to new cohousing groups and affordable housing developments start-ups.
His most recent book, Cohousing Communities: Designing for High-Functioning Neighborhoods, delivers a complete, start-to-finish guide for designing anything where the emphasis lies with the community. His other books include Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities (published in 1988 and still in print), coauthored with Kathryn McCamant, the book that introduced cohousing to the United States. The Senior Cohousing Handbook: A Community Approach to Independent Living, as well as a dozen other books about housing. He lives in a 34-unit community, Nevada City Cohousing, in Northern California, which he designed. He previously lived in Doyle Street Cohousing in Emeryville, California, with his family for 12 years. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him, along with Kathryn McCamant, with coining the word cohousing.
