ABSTRACT
This section raises questions about the relevance of the past to the future, and suggests possible models for further development. With housing density necessarily increasing, along with mobility, the pressure for relatively smaller dwellings in new relationships to one another will also increase. The “cohousing” movement, which began in Denmark in the 1970s, and now is widespread in Europe and America, offers one possible model. Cohousing, which draws upon the cooperative traditions already reviewed by Spencer-Wood and Ravetz, seeks to create relatively dense new communities in which residents give up some privacy and join in a number of collaborative activities. Usually, there is an effort to include a variety of residents – single and married, young and old, well-to-do and not so well-to-do. The important Danish example of Trudeslund (Figs. 72, 73) is surveyed by Kathryn McCamant. The desire to replicate older kinds of community with modern means is also apparent in the prefabricated housing groups being mass produced by Ikea (Fig. 74), reported on here in a New York Times article by John Leland. In apparent contrast to these kinds of community-oriented housing is the American trailer or mobile home, one of the most successful products of prefabrication, analyzed by political scientist Allan D. Wallis, and John Brinckerhoff Jackson (a principal founder of modern landscape history). The mobile home offers single-family dwellings at low cost (and with easy financing) to more than twenty million Americans. These buyers sacrifice interior space in exchange for modern household technologies; they also, sometimes, value the possibility of movement – movement to lightly settled areas, or even to wilderness areas (Fig. 75). In this aspect, the “trailer” or mobile home reminds us of the kind of “home” described by Reyner Banham in Chapter 3. And it also has some affinities with the Walden hut documented by Maynard in Chapter 7.
