Rebuilding Community in America: Housing for Ecological Living, Personal Empowerment, and the New Extended Family

Creating Communities

Ken Norwood and Kathleen Smith. Shared Living Resource Center, Berkeley, CA, 1995. 530 pages, softcover, $24.50.

Rebuilding Community in America presents the case that we need to restructure the way we live. Instead of traditional single-family homes, suburban sprawl, automobile-oriented development, and the isolation of raising families with two working parents or single parents, the authors present a scenario of community living: why it makes sense, models of how it can (and does) work, and general information on how to make it happen.

Ken Norwood is a Berkeley architect and community planner who has been a leading voice for community-based planning for three or four decades. He founded the Shared Living Resource Center (SLRC) in the late-80s. Norwood and coauthor Kathleen Smith have done a very good job in conveying the essence of these new forms of community living that are variously called co-housing, eco villages, village-clusters, and shared-living communities.

Rebuilding Community in America introduces the process of planning and implementing a community living project largely through examples—both actual examples from real communities around the country, and made-up examples based on prototype designs and experiences from the SLRC. The fictitious examples seemed a little overdone, replete with politically correct dialogue between community members and idyllic images of the new-age buildings and lifestyles. (Appropriately, Ernest Callenbach, author of

Ecotopia, wrote the foreword.)

One weakness of this book is its lack of specifics. We would like to have seen checklists on how to run planning meetings, example contracts between community participants, specifics on financing schemes, and estimated costs of putting such communities together. We were also annoyed by the numerous typos throughout the book.

Despite these weaknesses,

Rebuilding Community in America is a welcome introduction to the concept of community living. It will prove invaluable to people considering involvement in a co-housing community or some other form of shared living. Architects involved with co-housing may want to recommend this book to clients of such projects. Finally, this book provides inspiration that, yes, there is an alternative to the development patterns, sprawl, and dissolution of community that are plaguing our society.