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A group of people stand in an unbuilt plot of land in an urban context. Some of them hold maps, and they are intently observing their surroundings.

Four things I learned building a cohousing project in Brussels

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I am part of a group which is building a cohousing in Brussels. It’s a risky endeavor but I could just not resist it: I dislike how the real estate market has financialized the right of humans to decent housing, and I dislike how the manner of building homes have made us lonely, alienated, surrounded by strangers. As an economist, I also find modern housing incredibly inefficient, because it does not produce public goods – like common spaces and communities – that are, by definition, the most efficient goods there are. And so, after many years of longing and reflections, in late 2021 I found myself in a small group willing to try it out, and took the plunge. Our cohousing is called The Reef in tribute to the diverse webs of cooperation and competition that exists in real coral reefs, and also as an act of remembrance should all coral reefs in the world die, which is not unlikely at all.

It is an incredibly rich, life-changing experience. It is also the second most difficult thing I have ever done (the first was founding a reasonably successful punk-folk band), and the one with the first-highest stakes (for most of us it is all of our lives’ savings). Yet, I never posted about it before, with one exception at the beginning of the journey. Frankly, I was not sure of what lessons one could draw from it: we were certainly working hard, but were we getting anywhere? Were we on our way to success, or just deluding ourselves? I could not tell. In the legal framework and economic landscape of Belgium in the 2020s, building a cohousing is a highly uncertain affair. At every turn, you face another obstacle that has the potential to stop the entire project dead in its track. Will we find a site to build the cohousing in? Will we be able to work together in reasonable harmony, or will the group collapse under the weight of interpersonal conflict? Is there even enough demand for cohousings to complete a group? Will the war in the East make construction materials unaffordable, and our project with it?

Still, people around me are interested in learning about cohousing. Many have encouraged me to start sharing my reflections about it. And it is the right time: the project has reached a degree of maturity where, I think, we can start drawing some lessons from it – though it could still fail, of course. There is a lot to share, but I am going to start with only few of the clearest learnings so far.

1. Self-managed projects are surprisingly efficient

Over the years, I have spoken to many people that dream of living in a cohousing. Despite this, it is almost impossible to just go out and buy a house or an apartment that is part of one. There appears to be what economists call a market failure: there is a market demand for a more social way of living, but no supply. So, if you want to live in a cohousing you will most likely need to start a group, or join one, and have your cohousing built to specifications. Groups must make a choice as to how to organize themselves. One possibility is for the group to directly take charge of the project management: find a site to buy, negotiate with the owner, purchase it, hire an architect and a construction company, organize the financial flows and so on. The other is to hire a company that will take care of the project management for you. In Belgium we are fortunate that there exist two such companies.

The Reef chose to be a self-managed group. In practice, this means that a bunch of random people, none of whom is a real estate or construction professional, is now running a 9 million Euro real estate project. Counterintuitively, this is working better than we had any right to expect: processes are transparent and relatively fast. We learned to work as a team quite quickly, and there is a high level of accountability. The Reef is a healthier, more efficient working environment than many professional spaces I have worked in. We have to work harder, but that work will pay for itself in terms of added trasparency and fuller ownership of the project. There is pride and joy in working together as a group to build our future home, and we believe that doing it this way will make our little community even more cohesive – and we save money.

2. Building community comes natural

Most people in our group did not know each other before joining. Most of us joined not based on previous friendships or family ties, but because we are drawn to the idea of cohousing itself. Some of us thought this might pose a challenge: in this kind of project people are making large investments in an endeavor the outcome of which depends on their cohousing mates playing nice. A lot of trust is needed. Among the many challenges of cohousing, this one turned out to be fairly easy. Common involvement in this kind of project builds mutual trust, even friendships, relatively quickly. This is because the project itself gets you into repeated interactions with each other. Reputation is obviously valuable, so people do not like to drop the ball on one another other. In a short time, you realize you can trust these people after all, and start to relax and enoy their company. I have no doubt that The Reef will be an imperfect but functional, and even beautiful, community.

3. Process and information tidiness are critical

In 2021, as a prequel to the formal start of the process of building The Reef, the founding group spent a few months researching cohousing. We read up on everything we could find, and engaged with extant cohousing groups to learn from their experiences. We also arranged to visit several already-built cohousings. All sources pointed to how critical good process is.

The reasoning is straightforward. Building a cohousing takes 4-7 years. During this period, you will be doing weekly meetings plus individual- or small-group work. All of this effort is unpaid, and you will still have all of your personal and professional responsibilities. You might even be asked to step up a little to cover for your cohousing mates: for example, in our group parents of small children are given a pass, and just asked to respect the deadlines and otherwise do what they can.

In a situation like this, it is super important to be methodical and efficient, or you will become overwhelmed. The Reef is very methodical, on two fronts. First, we are organized according to a variant of a model called sociocracy. This means plenaries + teams that report to the plenary and do the heavy lifting of preparing the decisions for the plenary to take. All meetings are facilitated (by a Team Facilitation, whose members took trainings in sociocratic methods). The entire group took trainings in non-violent communication as a measure to prevent the escalation of conflicts. This method is very efficient, and it saves time on decision making that we sorely need for operations. For example, while searching for a site we scouted the entire city on bicycles and on foot for six months, mapping and evaluating 170 potential sites. Even with a fairly large group of a dozen active adults, you see why efficiency is so important.

Second, we take information management seriously, and adopted ways inspired by the open source and open knowledge movement. All information is public by default, and protected only if there is a need for confidentiality. A very successful move was to ban emails completely, and instead move our communication onto an online forum. This reduces Inbox stress and allows people full access to every communication, letting them choose what they want to engage with. It also makes past communications very searchable (we even use tags consistently, something that I have not experienced in any other working environment). Do not underestimate the impact of using good forum software over email – let alone stuff like Facebook or Whatsapp or Slack groups, which is not, repeat not, optimized for economical and accountable communication! Our forum as of now hosts over 10,000 messages, and has over 300,000 pageviews, and the fact that it allows access while not flooding us with notifications is valuable. Transparency is also important

From open source culture we also learned the importance of good documentation: for example, we have a guide to The Reef’s digital assets, one to using tags and groups in the forum, one to making changes to the website, a manual to onboard new members, a governance document. Each one of these shares knowledge and empowers everyone in the group, removing organizational bottlenecks, at the cost of having to write things down in a clear and accessible format.

4. A cohousing ecosystem is coalescing in Brussels

Self-managed groups like ours need not be navigating uncharted waters all the time. To our surprise and delight, cohousing is something like a movement. People support each other, mostly with information that can save us enormous amount of time. The advice we received from our sister cohousings at the beginning of the journey was invaluable. Also, there are now a few professionals in Brussels that understand cohousing and have experience of building them: the architects’ studio Stekke and Fraas has already built three cohousings in Brussels; Mark Van den Dries, a retired entrepreneur that has led several successful cohousing projects (he lives in one) and now offers himself as a coach; the Namur notary Pierre-Yves Erneux. A Dutch-Belgian bank, Triodos, offers mortgages adapted to the reality of cohousing.

All this means that we have it much easier than first-generation cohousings. Like all economic movements, cohousing is cumulative: if you were to start a project now, you would face fewer uncertainties than we did, because you could build on our experience. And if you or someone you know did start a cohousing, I would be interested to learn about it, be it through a link you share or by sharing war stories over coffee.

Photo: The Reef’s group explore a candidate site for the cohousing project in summer 2024. CC-BY The Reef Cohousing

Landscape of Brussels, looking from Laken over to Thurm et Taxis. A colorful wooden building stands in the foreground, overlooking a public garden; the city's skyline is in the background

Is cohousing a solarpunk movement?

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I am building a cohousing. It’s crazy, I know: it is going to take up a lot of my time for several years. It would be far more efficient to just buy an apartment and be done with it. But “efficient” is not where the action is, at least not for me. Apparently I am unable to stay away from the idea that modern living is too atomized, and that someone should do something. In fact, I should do something. I first became interested in cohousing about fifteen years ago, back in Milan. My friend Simone De Battisti was already well on the path, and he had fascinating stories to tell. Ten years ago, when my wife and I moved to Brussels, we decided to live communally – rent a big apartment and share. I never looked back.

But I did look forward. In 2019, supported by Edgeryders and EIT Climate-KIC, my colleagues and I, led by Matthias, started looking into what a more social rural and urban living (the latter being what interests me personally) might look like in the era of groupware and open source tech. We spoke with architects and community organizers, technologists and city leaders; we held brainstorming workshops and took part in socializing events. What we found is a longing for three things: environmental sustainability; a deeper sociality; and non-market coordinating mechanisms (run the building rather than hire a professional; grow some of our own food, produce our own solar energy, etc.).

In a way, this does not make a lot of sense. What difference is it going to make if your condo is bulk buying organic-and-local veggies? You are still going to live in a world driven by global logistics and Monsanto and Blackrock. The planet is still going to burn and drown, and you are still going to breathe polluted air. Sociality, sure, it’s nice to be in good terms with your neighbors. But again, it’s a tough world out there, there’s homelessness and vulnerability, and the climate refugees, so that you can only keep up your communitarian paradise at the cost of locking yourself behind a gate. And as for market mechanisms, we are told they are efficient, and they are: building your own cohousing means that it takes five years before you can move in, and in that time it will basically be like running a company. It is far simpler to turn to the real estate market.

And yet, those choices feel right. Right enough, indeed, that in 2021 I myself decided to band together with a small group of Brussels-based people, start a not-for-profit as a shell for the project, put my shoulder to the wheel, and push like hell. Why do I bother? This question has troubled me a lot: it still does. But I do have an answer now: building a cohousing is like building a different world within the world we have. And, in terms of that different world, the choices of green, social, and non-market make plenty of sense. Most cohousings I know incorporate elements of solarpunk, with its optimistic-yet-realistic approach, its ethos of self-actualization in relative harmony with the planet and other people, and its “luddite hacker” approach to technology (on which Cory Doctorow has much to say).

By now, I have done research on solarpunk art, literature and even economics, and I think I understand it better. It is utopian thinking, to be sure, but in their defense, solarpunks have bothered to chart a route that will take us from here to there. Also in their defense, when humans are by some miracle left alone for a few precious years by late-stage capitalism’s artificial scarcity, they tend to create distinctively solarpunk-looking physical objects and social arrangements, like the private-yet-open-to-all garden in Brussels in the photo above. I see solarpunk everywhere, from Boeri’s vertical forest to the depiction of Wakanda in the Black Panther Marvel movies, to the plethora of Burning Man-like events all over the world. It’s like the world is bursting at the seams, and it wants to be solarpunk now. And this is before you even start talking about the climate crisis, which, believe me, I do.

Solarpunks are quite realistic. They are obsessed with organization, and have recruited existing organizational models that they like, or come up with new ones, to do (in theory) just about anything, from space programs to, well, building a cohousing. They are big on cooperatives, and social capital underpinning highly efficient handshake deals; not so big on complex financial products and sueing each other. They are also big on collective intelligence, building strong groups and making the most of everybody’s knowledge and skills. This tends to produce intelligent decisions, but also to be slow and frustrating. To mitigate the problem, solarpunks have co-opted or developed, frameworks like sociocracy, techniques like Nonviolent Communication, and a thousand hacks to make decision-making more efficient while still giving everyone a voice.

They are also more risk averse than your typical capitalist enterprise: which makes plenty of sense, because in their world a bankruptcy is not only a legal procedure, it is letting your community down. This is very good for me personally: our own cohousing is a seven million euro project, and building the group is much like starting a company: it’s not so important that your partners are your best friends, but it is important that they are rock solid, and that they have your back, as you have theirs.

In my experience, most people who sympathize with the solarpunk movement and most people building cohousings are, in a sense, similar. They – we – are nostalgic for a different world, that never existed, and likely never will. But in a sense, this does not matter, because the solarpunk utopia is fractal: it can exist in small things, like a community garden or a cohousing. And those things, we can build. Thanks to all this organizational wisdom, we can even build them to survive and thrive within the world we have, while still hoping for a better one.

And so, we will. Our cohousing is called The Reef, in tribute to the diverse webs of cooperation and competition that exists in real coral reefs, and also as an act of remembrance should all coral reefs in the world die, which is not unlikely at all. If you want to talk to us, or even wish to join us, get in touch.

Photo by me, CC0.