ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that co-housing is a spatial organization that over a long time has shown some important characteristics, and that there is what could be called a ‘social logic of space’ in co-housing. Two processes in the creation of ‘commitment’ to a collective are identified: on the one hand, ‘detaching’ from the surrounding context and, on the other hand, ‘attaching’ to the collective. The early predecessors of co-housing were all complex internal spatial organizations detached from the urban context and placed as ‘buildings in the park’. Co-housing projects from the 1970s and onwards have in turn been described as coming in two ‘models’: the ‘Danish’ cluster of low-rise houses and the ‘Swedish’ high-rise multi-family building. The Danish model is quite widespread in the Anglo-Saxon world. Using some central concepts in Hillier and Hanson’s space syntax, it will here be questioned whether these seemingly different two models of co-housing are really spatially different as far as ‘internal’ community and ‘external’ detachment is concerned. The chapter ends with a discussion of how co-housing can deal dialectically with the potentially vicious circle between ‘internal’ community and ‘external’ detachment.
