The economics of happiness

October 28th, 2009

Does identikit suburban life leave you cold? Do you long for your children to grow up as part of a bigger community, where there’s always help close at hand? Perhaps you are just looking to live a simpler, low-carbon existence, complete with your own space but surrounded by like-minded people?

If any of this strikes a chord with you, it could be time to consider joining one of the co-housing/communal living projects that are undergoing something of a renaissance.

Writes Miles Brignall, he goes on

At the heart of most of the newest schemes is the sense of being part of a like-minded community but retaining your personal space. The most recent example of the modernisation of the concept can be seen in Lancaster. A group of potential co-housees have bought a former industrial site outside the city, where they plan to build a group of 30 eco-houses, complete with communal area. The scheme is a modern take on communal living that could have a wide appeal. Already 21 houses have been taken, but the Lancaster project is still looking for another nine families or individuals to join them.

Its a response for many to the growing realisation that modern life is rubbish and that the shopping mall is not the panacea to what ails us, shopping it seems does not set us free.

The word commune gets a bad press but where does commune come from? Wikipedia tells us Communes in Europe during the Middle Ages were sworn allegiances of mutual defense (both physical defense and of traditional freedoms) among the citizens of a town or city. They took many forms, and varied widely in organization and makeup. Communes are first recorded in the late 11th and early 12th centuries, thereafter becoming a widespread phenomenon. They had the greater development in central-northern Italy, where they were real city-states based on partial democracy. The English and French word “commune” appears in Latin records in various forms. The classical Latin communio means an association. In some cases the classical Latin commune was used to mean people with a common interest. Ultimately, the roots are cum (with or together) + munire (to wall), literally ‘to wall together’ (i.e., a shared fortification)

The impressive Jane Young writes about her experience of growing up on Shetland in Surfing the waves of change lose yourself to find yourself

Yok Fest

The intimacy gleaned from co-existing in close quarters – safe quarters, where doors are open (in fact you’re liable to wake up in the morning and find someone asleep on your sofa who wasn’t there the night before) is intense, but therapeutic. The physical intimacy of festivities – dancing, hugging, sharing homes – makes people feel okay with their lot.

Scientific studies prove our need for intimacy – our need to be touched. Even placebo acupuncture makes us happy; or alternative therapies that involve stroking or any sort of physical contact. The ‘free huggers’ in cities are an attempt to reach out, touch and comfort our fellow humans, who’ve found themselves too self-conscious to be spontaneous. This introversion has caused us to grow self-absorbed – and false, because we’re making up an identity we’ve lost. Our narrative is veiled with niceties and empty phrases.

Humans are physiologically interdependent. We depend upon one-another for happiness. Those with fewer friends die younger. The mood of another in the same room affects our mood. We mimic, mirror, send signals.

Surfers out there, riding the wave of revolutionary change brought about by our networked society (and loving it), understand we can stop relying on institutions and take responsibility for change and quality of life. This responsibility breeds happiness, because it arises from feeling part of something.

Knock on every door on your street and ask your neighbours if they’ve ever thought how bonkers it is that there are 40 lawns and 40 lawnmowers, then set up a lawnmower sharing club. Start a global tribe of like-minded passionistas around something that matters. Fed up with a crappy council service? Crowd-source an alternative. Chip in and take it upon yourself.

So its no surprise then that,

Adopting the Danish co-housing model, Chris Coates and his colleagues’ plan is to build a community on “ecological values and to be at the cutting edge of sustainable design and living”.

The houses, which will be a mix of sizes, will be built to the highest environmental standards but cost the same as a conventional house of the same size in the area – typically £160,000-£240,000. They will feature solar water heaters, and there are plans to put in a biomass boiler. The long-term goal is to build an electricity generating hydro scheme using the picturesque river Lune, which runs adjacent to the site.

Co-housing doesn’t just make environmental sense, it can also make financial sense. Residents should expect to save money on energy bills and through sharing things such as cars and childcare costs. Cooking and eating communally is also deemed important.

David Boyle in Authenticity, Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust For Real Life argues that we are witness to the emergence of a powerful new trend – pro-local, pro-authentic – that will overturn our conventional assumptions about globalisation and virtualisation. Authenticity tracks the emergence of the New Realists – possibly up to 50 per cent of the population of the UK – who are not convinced by corporate technologists and globalizers, and are increasingly committed to real food, real culture, real politics, real schools, real community, real medicine, real culture, real stories… And people are swapping their inner city gardens for small holdings, the daily commute for early morning milking of the cow or goat, their domestic cats for pedigree pigs, their blackberries for home-made compost. There is a shift in ambition away from consumerism and city life, for the first time in generations more people more people are moving to rural areas that are moving out of them.

Exhausted by consumerism and an industrial life, people are beginning to ask what more exactly means, realising that it does not exist being trapped in the corridors of the office, or, at the bottom of a shopping bag.

Nobel Prize winner and economist, Amartya Sen argues that, ‘happiness as it is can hardly be the only thing that we have reason to value, not the only metric for measuring other things that we value. But when being happy is not given such an imperialist role, it can, with good reason, be seen as a very important human functioning among others. The capability to be happy is, similarly, a major aspect of the freedom that we have good reason to value’. The perspective of happiness illuminates a critically important part of human life’. Indeed and Sarkozy’s French government created a commission in 2008 led by Joseph Stiglitz that looked at the broader issues surrounding GDP, it was interested in the measurement of economic performance and social progress

Increasing concerns have been raised since a long time about the adequacy of current measures of economic performance, in particular those based on GDP figures. Moreover, there are broader concerns about the relevance of these figures as measures of societal well-being, as well as measures of economic, environmental, and social sustainability.

Diggers and Dreamers and UK Co-housing network

Happiness

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