SUNSITE

We woke up this morning to a voice down the road shouting something loudly into a ‘gjallarhorn’. After turning over a couple of times cursing the noise we went to the window to see what was going on. As it turns out there were loads of people, equipment, cranes, fires, smoke and what have you not all over the place, and a bossy guy shouting into their midst and we realized they were filming and apparently is was a Hollywood movie called “Knowing“. Once we realiased there were famous actors (yes, Suzy got very excited as she finds Nicolas Cage very handsome) and lots of action down the road annoyance turned into curiosity. It was quite fun having something like this happening in the street so we kept tabs on what was going on throughout the day, but disappointingly Nic never came over to say hi, must have been too busy.

I have been very lazy writing on the blog lately. My main excuse is that we are in the middle of winter. Even though it is quite warm during winter compared to back home, winter here still slows you down and makes you lazy. I have been looking everywhere for bookshelves that I am happy with and when I finally found them, of course they had to cost about $4.000 (200.000 isk). So, after months of searching we went back to the original idea and got a cheap thingy for IKEA. Our books have not been comfortably placed in nice bookshelves for over 2 years now so it was a monumental relief to get them into the cheap but nice IKEA shelves.

At the Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne a few weeks ago I came across this concept called co-housing.

Intrigued we went to a meeting where the concept was being introduced and I have to say, I like it. The idea is that you build up to about 20 homes and add to it a common house that everyone owns together and shares. This way people can have several common rooms where you do stuff together.

The community of the co-housing inhabitants will them selves decide on all matters pertaining to matters of the common areas. The idea is to create a small scale community like you have in small towns and villages within the city and by sharing resources you can actually have more space and stuff without having to own it your self.

Apparently many of the cohousing communities also tend to become very environmentally aware. Waste and water usage become better managed. Anther aspect I love about these concepts is how these housing projects are designed to have no vehicle roads inside the main area. In Melbourne you never see a neighborhood / collection of houses that don’t vehicle access practically everywhere.

These cohousing things reduce roads and parking spaces to a minimum by having joint parking at the fringes and green areas taking up most of the space rather than (a few well selected words here) roads. The green areas are often designed to grow edible things. Olive trees, fruit trees, grape vines, vegetable gardens, herbs and cabbage grow inside the collective and the residents are able to use them from the gardens rather than buy them in shops. This by it self is just about as green as any green project gets.

We are very much into this concept, it sounds like something we would like to be a part of. In Melbourne there is as yet no such place but there are two projects under way now. One in the Dandenong area and one in Heidelberg. This concept is now quite developed in Denmark and some other European countries though and if the Australian ones will be equally successful our next home might just be in one such community.

+ Superbia, an article on cohousing
+ Canadian Cohousing network

It is all confirmed now, we have bought an apartment in the city! Offer accepted, deposit payed and mortgage approved. We will be moving in by mid April.