Sustainable Living and Co-Housing: Evidence from a Case Study of Eco-Villages

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Documents

  • Bella Margrethe Mørch Marckmann
  • Kirsten Gram-Hanssen
  • Toke Haunstrup Christensen
In this article we examine aspects of the different arguments for the environmental advantages of co-housing compared with individual households. The analysis is structured around four main questions, which are argued to be decisive for the question of co-housing and sustainability. The first is whether co-housing offers better opportunities for choosing and using more sustainable technologies, which also relates to the question of whether co-housing offers better opportunities for building smaller and denser and thus more energy efficient buildings. The second and third questions are socially oriented; one relates to the claim that co-housing can support pro-environmental behaviour among residents as they can support each other's norms and practices. The fourth and last claim relates to a discussion of co-housing as a more sustainable opportunity especially for people living alone, as the growing number of small households is an emerging sustainability problem. The empirical analyses are based on the results from a Danish study of eco-villages including a survey, interviews with representatives of the eco-village movement and a detailed case study of a group of people in the process of establishing a new cluster in an existing eco-village. The aim of the article is to contribute to the general discussions about co-housing and sustainability. The study adds nuances to this discussion and shows that the answer is not as straightforward as presented in much of the literature.
Original languageEnglish
JournalBuilt Environment
Volume38
Issue number3
Pages (from-to)413-429
ISSN0263-7960
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2012

Number of downloads are based on statistics from Google Scholar and www.ku.dk


No data available

ID: 120127971