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Greek Village Cohousing
Village Design Choreographs Human Behavior
The Cohousing
Participatory Design Process
Specialized architectural design is a vital feature of successful cohousing, but social architecture is equally if not more important. The participatory design process is an important part of this social architecture because it is an important opportunity for the community to get to know each other, learn how to work together, and find the collective values they share taht will inform the village design.
In North America, the participatory design process has been distilled into an effective series of Design Workshops. However, North American design workshops lack the inspiration of nearby, breathtaking, authentic, and ancient villages–these are ubiquitous in Greece and are Greece's gift to the world. A sense of the most beautiful and effective village design is in all Greek's blood, and we would like to experience the beauty of Greek Villages to be part of our participatory design workshop experience.
Our group regularly gathers on our land and participates in design workshops, both architectural and social governance. The trips are wonderful opportunities to get together and have fun as well. We love visiting the area villages and world heritage UNESCO villages nearby for inspiration. Thus, amidst planning our Common House floor plan, our planning our Plateia and landscaping, we love to visit places like Monemvasia, a UNESCO world heritage village, and seaside Gytheio with its red-tiled roofs, or mountain village Mystras with its Byzantine castle. Collaborative neighborhood creation has never been so fun!!!
Our group is so excited to partner with cohousing professionals and with 2 people who have become much more than our developers. They bring a wealth of experience and a deep understanding of village and community to our project. While each cohousing group journey is unique, there are many similarities to the design workshops. Here is an experience of one of our design workshops below (excuse the poor video).
Cohousing design is both unique to the individual community and also universal in it's utilization of special Cohousing design elements. American Cohousing Architect Bryan Bowan explains some of the most important cohousing design elements in the video below.
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