Speak Up- Kōrerotia20 December 2018

Collaborative urban living

Male This programme was first broadcast on Canterbury’s community access radio station Plains FM 96.9 and was made with the assistance of New Zealand on Air.

Female Coming up next conversations on human rights with “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”, here on Plains FM.

Sally E ngā mana,E ngā reo,E ngā hau e whāTēnā koutou katoaNau mai ki tēnei hōtaka: “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”.

Tune in as our guests “Speak Up”, sharing their unique and powerful experiences and opinions and may you also be inspired to “Speak Up” when the moment is right.

Kia ora, this is “Speak Up-Kōrerotia”, a specialist human rights radio show and podcast. We cover topics as diverse as cultural identity, disability issues, gender, gender identity, international affairs - and, like today’s topic, the inter-relationship between urban spaces and human rights. This is an area that fascinates me personally and which will only continue to increase in importance, I’m sure, as the world’s population continues to grow and as our cities do as well. I’m Sally Carlton, your host, and today we’re discussing collaborative urban living.

I’m really pleased to introduce Jason Twill, Greer O’Donnell and Jane Quigley who are our guests for today. It would be fantastic if you could all introduce yourselves, tell us a little bit about what you do and why you’re taking part in this conversation. Jason, maybe we’ll start with you.

Jason Yup, Jason Twill, I am from the US as you can hear from my Yankee accent. I did a lot of development work in New York City so my career over the last 20 years has really been defined by really pushing more social and ecologically-responsible development models in cities, caring very much about how we build cities for the 99% and really focusing on equity and inclusion and accessibility for all people.

Sally When you say for “the 99”% what exactly do you mean?

Jason I mean that cities can be for everybody so we don’t gentrify minority neighbourhoods, low income neighbours, different ethnicities; where cities are places of tolerance and cultural melting and reciprocity of cultures so that’s why cities are great and if they are it’s for everybody and you gentrify and focus on only high end housing, high end retail, high end commercial you kind of price out and start to erode that culture and

values which cities are always built for a place for humans to come together.

Sally Nice idea.

Jason It’s a great idea.

Sally And you’re here visiting Christchurch as part of your Innovation Fellow and job at the University of Technology in Sydney, is that correct?

Jason Yeah so I’m part-time at the University of Technology in Sydney; I’ve been very grateful that they’ve offered me a position to do some research there, teach more equitable ways of looking at housing, alternative ways of housing and work place models. For cities, I do some research on new economic models that start to integrate how we can look at environmental value and social value differently and how we look at investing in places so we don’t look at the hidden impacts we have on the society and the environment.

Then I have Urban Apostles which is my business where I focus on consulting and doing my own development so I focus on deliberative housing models which is co-housing and other forms of housing which is non-speculative in nature so we work with groups of people that want to have a certain more communal way of living for owner occupied housing in cities.

Sally Sounds fantastic. Jane, how about you?

Jane Kia ora I’m Jane Quigley and I’ve been interested in community living for over 20 years and I think it really stems from having lived in the country, farming, in the first part of my adult life having children and having the neighbours be a five-minute drive away. And look, I thought there had to be something better really so I’ve actually probably nearly 20 years been quite active in bringing together ecovillages but we now call them co-housing communities which is very cool. So just after the earthquakes I called on some of my old friends who I’d been involved with the establishment of ecovillages, I called them together and said, “Hey, there’s a real opportunity here to develop something in the centre of Christchurch.” So we formed the Viva Project to support sustainable and community-focused development in the rebuild.

Sally And I’m sure we’ll talk a little bit more about that as we go through.

Jane Great.

Sally Greer, I’m really pleased to hear you workefor Ohu, the Office of Holistic Urbanism. I particularly love your acronym - meaning ‘to work collaboratively’ in Te Reo - I think that’s awesome.

Greer Yes it’s a very suited name for what we’re trying to achieve. So I’m Greer

O’Donnell. I have a number of interests in relation to this subject matter. Of probably the most relevance is the work that I’m doing with Ohu Development which is the development company which specialises in supporting communities to create and own their own assets that sustain them in the community which they belong to. I also have been researching into liveability and what impacts our liveability in New Zealand and how that’s impacted by legislation and regulation that we currently have and where there’s areas of improvement. I’ve had a background in development working with the government largely on the rebuild of Christchurch and have an interesting perspective around development projects which were very top-heavy and essentially missed out on the input that communities could have contributed and I think that there’s a real opportunity now in this next phase of Christchurch regeneration for the development of our city to be led by the people who reside in it. I think there’s been a number of great moves made by the government in terms of committing large infrastructure projects but what’s now really important is the communities filling in the gaps between what were termed ‘Anchor Projects’ because that’s really where the life and soul of cities comes from.

I’m like the others; I’ve got a fascination in community co-housing, co-living arrangements. I myself grew up very closely associated with what some New Zealanders will remember as the Ohu communities - also known as communes - that were developed in the ‘70s, having family that was involved in those communities and still are very closely linked into those who now live in ecovillages up the Whanganui River so I also had a fascination in what it means to bring people together in living environments and the broad spectrum of those that we have in New Zealand and very much looking to expand that into the urban form within cities and to explore how we can translate some of those more fringe communities into our central cities and how we do that in terms of modern co-living in smaller spaces. So that’s me.

Sally So my first question for all of you is: We’ve mentioned communes, ecovillages, co-housing - I notice Jason, in the talk you gave, you were talking about micro-neighbourhoods - are these effectively the same sort of thing and what exactly do we mean when we’re talking about these sorts of terms?

Jason Yeah I think when you look at communal living that’s kind of how we always used to live, the kind of way we live now with nuclear families and exploded around cities as separate homes, not living with our parents and next generation is unique in modern contemporary culture.

Sally And I would argue in this particular western culture too.

Jason Correct, very western culture, that’s correct, that’s a very good point; there’s much we can learn from our indigenous brothers and sisters out there on this different way of living. I’m heavily influenced by Native Americans and I’ve been heavily influenced by having mentors in

indigenous Australians as well but this contemporary co-housing really has its mark in Denmark. In late 1968 there was an article in a newspaper I shared the other night where there was some local person in Copenhagen writing about the importance of every child having 100 parents and how what that means to raising that generation, how their male and female mentors in our lives as we grow up around society and a group of 50 families took that literally and built one of the first contemporary co-housing projects in the world in Sættedammen and that’s an owner-occupied, very citizen-led development model where groups of people and families come together, get an architect, work with the local government and planning agencies, find land and really co-create their own form of living that’s much more sustainably-minded, much more community-focused, much more shared equity, sweat equity and financial equity and how they want to live their lives not just in private isolated homes but really connected to each other and sharing and helping each other.

Now take that to what’s happening in today’s world with what I’ll call this immune response with rapid urbanisation and the disease of unaffordability in cities, you have this another generation coming up as eco boomers and millennials looking to do very similar form of desiring that social cohesion in how we live… But taking into a contemporary urban context, and co-living is kind of just the millennial way of looking at co-housing but not necessarily having ownership. So the co-living models that I’m seeing around the world - and Greer can probably shed some light on that with her experience here - is a generation of not necessarily…. And I’m not going to speak on behalf of the whole thing, it’s not stereotyping them, but there’s a large cohort you’re seeing with this moving in co-living that they don’t want to necessarily own a home. They want to have the experience of a place that they like to live in and love, they can pay a membership to be a part of this group or community and it’s very new so it hasn’t been scaled and tested around the world but it’s a lot of people that are colonising old buildings or freeing up new ways of living to make it affordable and accessible for them. So it’s kind of re-inventing co-housing in a contemporary dense urban context.

Sally Fantastic. Greer have you got anything you’d like to add?

Greer I guess I’d just build on what Jason is saying. A lot of the work that we’re doing - the communities that have raised their heads when searching for a professional entity to help them - are communities who very much are seeking a new way of doing things. They generally have lesser equity to invest so they aren’t able to buy their own home but they also have less of, as Jason mentioned, a desire to necessarily own what they create a home in. So the notion of home ownership is definitely shifting and a lot of the groups that have approached or who - especially in Auckland - are seeking to form groups where they can maximise what equity or what small amounts of money they can save to have a place that’s a home, that they share with others. And its breeding more of a mutual reliance model and how you translate that into the financial and the legal

structures to enable that kind of development is really challenging. At the moment we have traditional build-to-rent models which come out of Australia and are being applied here in New Zealand but again it’s still speculative, it’s still led by a developer; it hasn’t been led by the people who will inhabit these spaces. So there isn’t really a model that is easily replicated or shared between the groups who are interested so I think there’s a large amount of education and knowledge-sharing before these projects are going to come to fruition at any scale.

I know of some very small groups of three-to-four people coming together, building townhouses side by side in the name of co-housing but it still remains an individual dwelling with separate living divisions by those normal partitions and walls so the actual community group ends up living individually even though they came together to do the development. So I think there’s still some way to go in New Zealand implementing a modern-day co-ownership model and that’s hopefully what we, through Ohu, will be able to fast track for people.

Sally Cool that sounds great. Alright well, we have unfortunately run out of time in our first segment. We’re going to have Jane’s choice of song which is Jack Johnson’s ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, The 3 R’S song.’ Very appropriate for today’s topic.

MUSIC BY JACK JOHNSON – The 3 R’sSally Kei te whakarongo koutou ki te hōtaka “Speak Up-Kōrerotia”, you’re

listening to “Speak Up-Kōrerotia”. Jane, we’re going to start with you this time. What are some of the benefits of collaborative and urban living?

Jane Look, I agree with both Greer and Jason, what they’ve talked about. Really interesting we’ve… Just to jump off something you said, Jason, about the co-housing communities in Denmark. Within the Viva Project we’ve studied this quite a lot and also in North America and there is quite a firm model to have to build successful co-housing communities so I really don’t want to reinvent the wheel regarding how much land to have, how many people to have involved in a co-housing community. Interestingly I went to India at the beginning of this year for around a month and visited a lot of villages and did a bit of village outreach and of course these people have lived in villages for eons, for thousands and thousands of years, so they’ve got villages down pat but what I noticed is… I noticed something about the babies: They were always carried either by a member of the extended family or the little children within the village but they were happy. They were poor but they were happy. So I’ve come to live in the city from the country and what I see is a lot of loneliness within the city. How can we have that different? How can we create something that supports everything? - and you talked about that, Jason, too. So that’s what we’re about within Viva, having happy loving communities.

Greer That really resonates with me, Jane, because I think in a world where we’re so socially connected through all of these platforms there’s a real

disconnectedness between our communities and our people and especially across generations. So building on the notion of ‘It takes a village [to raise a child]’ is, we’ve compartmentalised people into: “You’re children and you do this; you’re middle youth and teens and you behave like this; you’re young professionals and you should live like this; and, you’re old people and you should live like that” and actually what these co-housing projects do is they offer an opportunity to break down the barriers. I’m particularly interested in the intergenerational and the impact of having mixed age groups together because I think that the best benefit out of these co-housing projects is the bringing of people together again. They bring people together in ways that they have to work and think about the group and the benefit of the masses as opposed to the individual and I think that’s a really, really important thing given that we’ve been so selfish in more recent years and we’ve moved away from that village mentality. I think we’re seeing a resurgence of the prevalence of that or the demand for that in the cities that we’re now living in.

Sally Do you have any ideas as to why there might be a bit of resurgence?

Greer I think it’s because people are lonely and people are seeking… There’s so many issues with mental health now, one in four New Zealand women, men, suicide rates… There’s a proven issue, it’s prevalent, it’s talked about finally and so now people are solutioning… Where there’s a problem, people create solutions and I think that’s what we’re starting to see.

Jason I also think people are also craving authenticity and the kind of a flight back to craft and local identity of place so I think we’re losing a sense of identity of who we are in cities with hyper globalisation. So when you have property as an asset classed globalised in the ‘80s after the huge crash that happened in ‘89 and all these legal and financial mechanisms came in and we started considering homes as assets and commodities and ways to generate wealth and that’s where we kind of had this very franchised approach to housing that’s the same everywhere and then you have these cookie cutter towers that are investor security deposit boxes instead of homes so even the nomenclature we use in the industry around a product, it’s very commoditised.

I think people genuinely crave… They’re missing that social connectedness or missing community and there is massive social isolation which is driving the mental health issues like Greer just mentioned so when you engage people on the street, people want to be in an urban environment, they want to be part of a community.

And the other benefits I think of co-housing: One, it’s a more effective, efficient, more sustainable way of living - people rely on each other. I too am a huge fan of intergenerational housing. When you have people in retirement years be connected with the next generation it gives more vitality in their retired years and if you have parents with young kids and you have that kind of day-care and child rearing - it’s not just the parents’

responsibility but larger group - and you get more affordable childcare, it’s less stress on the parents and you’ve got to think what’s it all for? Are we all just buying a house to show it off with my fancy refrigerator and marble countertops and we get like a 20% return or is it a place for me to raise an amazing family and really feel connected and belonging to a place?

That franchise approach to city making happening across the road is really frustrating people. I travel and do this talk all over the city and Christchurchians are not alone - how do you identify yourself? Cantabrians - are not alone. Every time I do a talk I ask: “Raise your hand if you’re frustrated by the kind of development happening around you?” and everyone has raised their hand for 40 years. So there’s a gap in what ‘the market’ is delivering out there as a commodity and what people actually want and desire. I haven’t heard the word ‘co-housing’ used as much as I have in the last 18 months, it’s a mean right now, it’s that immune response like we’re doing it wrong and people want something different.

Greer I would agree with that comment entirely and I read an article today about how tricky the development market is at the moment and yet there’s so many people who need homes and need spaces - whether it’s office spaces or play spaces or any of the public areas - have all of this increased demand on them because we’ve got larger populations. Auckland has 850 people move here a week and yet the property industry is saying, “It’s so hard, we can’t make it stack up” and so the supply is not meeting the demand because the property industry tradition in property industry hasn’t listened and changed what they’re providing. So as a result people are seeking to do it themselves and you see that in Australia with their deliberate development models - the housing collective, I think - and people are doing it here individually but we just haven’t got to that point of scaling it up yet and I think that’s what these conversations in Ohu Development is really seeking to support and then synthesise the learning so that it can be shared and more and more people can take control of what it is that they want to produce as an outcome whether it’s co-housing or shared working spaces.

Jason There’s another really good benefit I forgot to mention. Because it’s owner-occupied and you have this kind of co-ownership and co-creation mentality there’s a lot more custodianship of place, there’s a lot more care and governance, self-governance of where you live and co-housing groups and you kind of drop them into an existing neighbourhood tend to have this catalytic impact of community development. So people from around the neighbourhood know there’s a place to go in the central lounge, there’s a garden maybe where the kids play together. So the Murundaka, which is a co-housing cooperative in Victoria in Heidelberg Heights, I think the statistic is like every week there’s something like 200 people from around the neighbourhood are always coming in and out of that place so really creates this really unique community generation there where you have these projects.

Sally One benefit that you haven’t yet mentioned that I thought might have cropped up is the environmental benefit as well, rather than the big urban sprawl and building further and further in brownfield for example, green field even. I presume that’s also something people are starting to think more about as well and I would imagine is being reflected a bit more in this model. Would that be true?

Jason Very much so.

Greer I would agree with that.

Jane And for the Viva Project where our focus is on social sustainability, environmental sustainability and financial sustainability - of course it all has to work financially in a project, co-housing project - that we’ll be creating so the environment is immensely important. Having environmentally sustainable principles both within the dwellings, the homes and within the environment, the landscape. However in saying that, the most important [benefit] is social sustainability. Like, you could have a subdivision somewhere just out of Christchurch that is highly environmentally sustainable but has no social sustainable features so the people could be just as lonely in those homes. And OK, they’d be great homes to show off, Jason like you mentioned earlier, but they could be incredibly lonely and have no connection. So it’s important that what we design, we design for the social sustainability of those communities. And there’s a lot of people now, more and more people, who understand about that - and you’ll be one of them, Jason.

Greer I think buildings being designed around people and the way they use them unfortunately hasn’t always been that way round with the people in the community being at the heart and I think there’s a much broader understanding of the importance of that. The environmental sustainability one is quite interesting, I think, because the notion of having smaller amounts of space and not needing an entire four bedroom house and a quarter acre dream - which has generally been New Zealand’s housing preference - is proving to be maybe a limitation on the uptake of medium-density housing and therefore a more dense co-housing model.

People still have preferences around space and access to the outdoors and being able to have a barbeque and so what I think is really interesting about the co-housing projects that we’re going to see coming online in New Zealand is how you bring those preferences together in our new urban context and how you provide through design outcomes buildings and homes that actually build social connectedness and provide for connected to the environment and connected to nature which is something that’s really important. So how you build in environmental elements to these buildings that’s not only sustainable but also relates to the type of people we are as Kiwis in New Zealand.

Jane Yes look, I think all of those are important and the interesting aspect

about that - and we touched on it at the beginning of this talk - is that if we involve people in a collaborative process from the ground up and we talk to them from the start and ask them what it is they want, they will start mentioning all those things, they’ll mention the social sustainability, they’ll mention the environmental sustainability. And within the Viva Project we’ve had over eight integrated design workshops and you know what? The people are saying the same things in all of those workshops: This is what we want. We want the cars to the edge of the community; we want a community space where we can gather regularly. And also the design has to be so that when people come into the community they walk through the communal space so they have an opportunity to see the people that live within the community and it’s so heartening to hear what it is that people want rather than the top-down approach.

Jason I just had dinner last night with Peterborough Co-op right here, they met me out on the street on the driveway to this central… They have no fences, there’s gardens everywhere in the back and trees and it’s very simple and beautiful and they have three picnic tables lined up and there was a big pot luck dinner and all the families came together, the kids were running around, we had this delicious meal and they brought up the plans so they got the insurance money and they’re looking at doing this communal living and they’ve… Exactly what you just described is what they desire. They put the parking off to the side on the lot they bought, central garden that everyone faces out to so they can all be connected to the earth, connected to food, kids can play and less stress on the mum and dad if they can see their kids safely in the courtyard instead of on the street. And the priority of this site was put for the central lounge and amenity area where everyone can congregate for meals, play music together, cook, do the laundry. And it’s designed so that everyone coming in and off the site has to walk through there so you see and it’s all about being connected to each other instead of being isolated.

Jane How exciting is that.

Sally Really cool. Well that’s the perfect place for our next break. Greer, we’ve got your son which was Alicia Keys, ‘New York Concrete Jungle.’ I presume this really needs no explanation as to why you chose that.

Greer No.

MUSIC BY ALICIA KEYS – NEW YORK CONCRETE JUNGLESally You’re listening to “Speak Up-Kōrerotia.” We’re speaking with Jason

Twill, Jane Quigley and Greer O’Donnell about collaborative urban housing. I thought we might do this final segment looking at the viability of this sort of model in New Zealand. We’ve touched already on this but let’s get into it in a bit more detail. Greer, I know you’ve been doing some research into some of the legal and legislative aspects - and you mentioned particularly human rights charters - so maybe that might be a good place to start this conversation.

Greer Yes it’s an interesting space obviously, there’s the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which speaks to the right to housing but there’s actually no legislative right to housing in our current political landscape. There’s a number of pieces of legislation that impact and not necessarily control but make the right to housing seem like it may be something that does exist in New Zealand but it’s not actually explicit. There are a number of means by which you can establish co-housing arrangements in New Zealand either through private law or under trust or incorporated societies, there are a number of models but there is not a common understanding in New Zealand about how you do that and how you pull a group of people together. I have found in the research that we’ve done that a lot of the legal structures rely on bespoke drafting which makes it very unaffordable for a lot of groups and there doesn’t seem to be an off-the-shelf kind of option that you can draw down like the Nightingale model.

The Nightingale model - there are some issues with that in New Zealand that can’t be directly transferred to our jurisdiction - but a large part of it can, the framework can be. And I think with the work that Jane and Viva are doing is that I think there will soon be a model that will be easily replicable in New Zealand and easily shareable. There are some limitations around the financing arrangements in New Zealand, the banks are generally uncomfortable; even though the notion of proportional ownership in investment is well understood, there is some way to go in getting the banks and financing companies to be less fearful around these community-led deliberative co-ownership models and proportional ownership models so it’s a large part of translating our aspirational language into the existing language that lawyers and bankers and property developers use while we go through this process of shifting from these more speculative models to community led models.

Jane Look it’s great that you talked about the aspirations because it was the aspirations that Viva was formed from, we didn’t go and look at any legislation that said well how can we have this? We probably would have been daunted before we even started! But, like, it’s involving a team of people. We’ve used our lawyer Karen Overend a lot to be guided in what we can do. So basically we tell her, “Well this is what we want” and then she finds the pathway to create it and I just totally believe that if people are committed and passionate enough there will be a way. And people have done it around the world too; for goodness sake this isn’t a new model, as we’ve all talked about. It’s centuries old! People living in villages, for goodness sake.

Jason I think it’s really interesting, there’s a co-housing network globally. They genuinely want to support each other - like Nightingale - we all support each other through the legal mechanisms, the investment perspectives: How do you engage people on this discussion? So we’re all supporting each other and it’s a co-learning community. I mean, you can’t talk about co-housing without mentioning Chuck Durrett - Jane’s got the book right in front of us. He’s been a global supporter of this and been very helpful

in getting groups off the ground all over the world and you call any person focusing on legal issues for co-housing, financial ones and they’re very open in helping share how they got through that process, how they dealt with that issue. It’s a very open-sourced community.

How that manifests on the ground locally in the context of New Zealand law, regulatory environments can be worked through. I’m less concerned about the legal financial mechanisms, I’m more concerned about how modern humans relate to land - meaning the biggest issue we have on every city on the earth right now is that when you look at land as a commodity it’s a finite resource and when you have hundreds of thousands of people competing for the same space in a concentrated area for places to learn, play, work and live you put tremendous pressure on that land. And cities have not done a good job at tempering land value and inflation which is underpinning everything around the unaffordability of cities from food, supply chain, housing, everything - which pushes us out farther from the urban core which makes it more expensive to put infrastructure, more expensive to move around, more expensive to get goods and services . So that is as fundamental paradigm shift of how we look at land and the mechanisms that are working really well in Europe and the US which I shared the other night is community land trust. We actually take the land component out of the deal, it’s non-speculative cooperative ownership of land as a common good and how do we look at land and be custodians of the land.

This is where we learn from indigenous peoples of the world in the way that they look at themselves in relation to land and ecology, that we belong to the earth. When modern western humans start to understand that relationship living within the means of our planet financially, ecologically and socially then we start to unlock the potential for these models to grow tremendously.

There’s about 270 community land trusts in the United States, some of which have over 5,000 units on them and they’re permanent affordable housing, permanent affordable businesses and create tremendous diversity and inclusion for the places that they’re created in. So there’s some underlying things that governments that need to take bold leadership on and start to create interventions for their cities and enable Viva to happen right here in Christchurch. You have a group of people here wanting this. The government needs to be an enabler of these housing models.

Sally Well that brings me to a really interesting point and that’s the unfortunate failure of the Breathe project to get off the ground and why on earth did that not succeed is I think a really, really big and very disappointing question.

Jane That’s right and actually I’d love to talk about that. Jason talked about asking people as he’s been travelling around the world if they’re frustrated with the housing that we’ve got in the cities and I put my hand

up at his talk but you know actually, people in Christchurch are more than frustrated. I want to swear actually! We’re incredibly annoyed about what happened around the Breathe project and look, we’d love to see it brought to life again. There were over 60 international entries for the Breathe project from many, many places around the world - Egypt, Germany, UK just to mention a few - and I personally, along with my team, put in hours and hours and hours of work. I barely went to bed before midnight as I worked on some of the visions of what we wanted in our plans and then to have the whole thing scrapped, how devastating was that?

Greer And I would just like to build on that from somebody on the inside, on the government side, I would just like to touch on two points that Jason raised around the treatment of land and how we view land and the leadership required by government. And in both those instances the government failed because the requirement for a return on the land, even if indirectly, remained, and the leadership in taking a hit was missing. So the government was still trying to act like a commercial entity instead of leading by example in terms of taking the commodity out of land.

Jason That’s not unique to Christchurch either.

Greer No and it’s a lack of the institution understanding what’s required, they’re kind of always last to the party and that project failed because it came down to project viability and a lack of political will to take a risk and so I think the frustration about…

Jason Or even just a longer term view of things.

Greer That’s right.

Jason I think you’re right, government will typically use the same analysis that the private sector will use to get a return on government property which in all intents and purposes is the people’s property. It’s owned by the government; it’s owned by us. So if they’re using highest and best use analysis they’re going to come to the same conclusion that a developer will because it’s like I can get the most profit by doing luxury apartment housing on this site. So what does that do to your economy? What does that do to the people for blood, sweat and tears of third generation businesses that have been in this community for 30 years that get displaced by that? There’s a multiplier of negative impact of that kind of analysis. Government needs to be a steward of the people, it should be looking at highest and critical use, it should understand housing is economic infrastructure for the vitality and the competiveness enabled to keep the very people in their city that make their city function and work. It’s the bus driver, the teachers, the nurses, people that work at human rights radio stations and raise kids here. What are cities for if not for everybody? If it’s only for the highest end part of the market… I have this theory the way that the industry is structured in delivering cities it’s causing this kind of ‘wankerisation’ of cities because when everything is

left. Mayor Hidalgo of Paris has a really great term: We’re creating the new ghettos of the future, ghettos of the rich. Everyone else gets priced out.

Jane So moving forward with Christchurch - let’s have some transparency like we’ve talked about it here in this interview; some transparency, that’s what people want moving forward within this city. We’ve got over 600 people on the Viva database and while not all of them want to necessarily live in a co-housing community, they’re people that want to see this kind of living happen. They want to be part of it even if they don’t want to live there - How cool is that? It’s very inspiring.

Sally I guess one thing that might be holding people back, as well, is the mentality of owning your own home, having the quarter acre dream - we’ve spoken about those before - but also this idea, perhaps, of if it’s a co-space, how is it all equitably divided? I suppose. How often do you get to use the BBQ? Who has young kids who might be doing some babysitting?... Those sorts of more social equitability discussions, I suppose. Have you noticed that in any of your work that that barrier has been surfacing, perhaps?

Greer I think this goes to a point Jason raised earlier about the characteristics of people and especially modern day people and the notion of working together and considering others is something that we need to remind ourselves of and is being really thoroughly explored through these projects. The ecovillage up the Whanganui River, I went and talked to them and they had some really, really interesting observations about their ecovillage and it was all around human nature and actually the biggest challenges they faced weren’t the legal structures or the financial structures - they would figure that out, like you guys mentioned before, you just work it out, you find the pathway - was actually how decisions were made and how you solve conflict and how you prioritise without hierarchy and how you move through disagreements.

And so they’ve set up lots of mechanisms to work through each of those things instead of being prescriptive, they kind of agree to principles of how they want to live together so they want to be able for everybody to participate and they want fairness and the majority needs to rule except for on these particular areas where actually one dissenter is not acceptable and so they’ve built these quite - not necessarily complex but they’ve been really brought out even though they may now appear simple - card systems where you have a card that says green for ‘Go,’ orange for ‘Middle of the road on that,’ red for ‘No’ and then a black card is ‘I absolutely can’t cope with whatever this decision is.’ They have rules around each of those cards and what they mean and what happens when they’re raised in groups and it’s a fascinating experiment around human behaviour and how even though they have all the best of intentions and they have chosen to live in a communal arrangements and yet they still have conflicts and challenges in that space.

Jane Look it’s really great that there’s a number of models. What comes to mind with what you were saying too, Greer, is Earth Song in Auckland and they use that model too and Jason mentioned the Creating Co-Housing book which I have here in front of me, they also talk about how to manage the human behaviour aspect and like these are important. Give us an opportunity, that’s what I say.

Jason It’s not all perfect. Humans are a strange species, we’re all very different personalities and you bring 40 people together and you’re a bit more exposed then human behaviour changes. But there’s cooperative governance models that have been tried and tested across hundreds of different co-housing developments and every group has to self-organise a bit and do what works for them but it builds character. You deal with conflict resolution in a much more amicable way. Yes there’s been some fights going on in co-housing, yes there’s some personalities that people get probably pushed out of the community but it’s never going to be perfect all the time but the fact that there’s self-governance and equity put into it. It gets into this kind of how many decades have we been sold this dream of having an isolated home with a backyard and fence and that’s how you have to do it. If you’re going to be a normal modern human.

So it gets into how the neurobiology of modern humans, about me-maps in our brains. Now we’re moving back from “me” to “we” and I think there’s the mentality of how we get that “we” mentality back so we all kind of share in what’s happening around us. What I love in all the co-housing projects I’ve visited around the world… The children that grew up there, that they’re just fluttering around with all these great adults and there’s always a chalkboard on the wall of who has got the responsibilities. If I stay as a guest I’m always in the kitchen cooking with people, it’s just great that we’re all sharing resources, sharing responsibilities and when someone is lagging they’re going to let you know about it and they get off their butt and they do it.

Jane I’m really lucky; I live in what Jason talked about as a co-living environment. I’ve got five houses and I rent to internationals so I live in a group with 47 other people so we have all that stuff. We have people not cleaning the kitchens but what I’ve had to develop is listening skills: “OK you just come over here and we’ll talk about it.” But I love it, I love being surrounded by that many people. How cool is that? How cool is my life or my business, it’s my business.

Greer I’m in my early 30s and so my generation, lots of the groups that I’ve been talking with all say, “Oh well how do we share money if we’re going to develop it together?” and they’re inherently distrustful of other people and they assume that people are going to be out to be self-interested and it’s actually getting that shift from the way that we’ve viewed collaboration and shifting towards a more trust-based regenerative ‘we’re going to create something together and we’re all going to benefit from that and we’re not out for the individual stuff’ and there is definitely a

demand that exists but I think we’re seeing more and more people who are probably more traditional in their views coming to the party out of their needs basis because they can’t - even though they’re all young professionals with well-paying jobs, they can’t afford to buy a house in Auckland and they can’t afford to rent a house in any of the suburbs so they’re looking out seeking well is there another option. And they’re coming together in groups saying, “Well yes we can do this together but how do we do that?” So it’s almost like we’re starting to convert the unconverted and with that comes the need to step them through how we go about dealing with all those human characteristics.

Jason Chuck will tell you to read his book.

Jane It’s a great, great book.

Sally Well my final question for you: Are you guys feeling optimistic about the future of these co-housing projects?

Jane I’m feeling totally optimistic, I’m feeling really excited and look, I just get over the week we’ve had a few… There was a Housing Matters Forum in the Council function room last Friday and people are coming together to talk about how can we have residential living within the four avenues of Christchurch and there’s a real optimism and a now about this happening so I’m really excited.

Sally Great.

Jason I’m super excited. I think if you look at across the world the movement is growing, it’s scaling and expanding and gaining momentum and that, I see, is a huge generational shift in thinking attitudes and behaviours about what kind of life people want in the Gen X and Gen Y millennials measuring success very differently than what our parents did - not so much around wealth but on experience. I think you have a much more socially conscious generation coming up behind us, they’re connected to all the world’s issues through the internet and they want something more meaningful in life. I think they’re craving that and not just like I want to be an investment banker and make a whole bunch of money and get a boat and be really sad and take drugs and get divorced and the recipe for the last generation but there’s more meaning. How do we have more meaning in life? How do we get more connected? How are we going to solve probably the biggest issues our species have ever faced - the ecological and social crises that we’re dealing with that we’ve created for ourselves?

Jane I think more and more people are asking, “How can I make a difference?”

Greer Definitely seeking meaning and purposefulness in not only the way that they work but in the way that they live and I think because of that I’m not only optimistic but I’m really confident and I’m just excited to see it all come to fruition because it’s all bubbling away and we just need a couple

of these projects to get a bit of profile and I think we’ll gain momentum really quickly in New Zealand.

Sally That’s a really great, upbeat vibe to finish on so I’d like to say kia ora, thank you very much all of you for taking the time, it’s been a really great discussion.

If you’re listening to this, don’t forget you can check out our Facebook and Twitter accounts. We’ll stick up some of the resources we’ve been discussing and also there’s a transcript available as well. Thank you.