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Cohousing fills society’s natural need to live in a community, said Eric Utne, founder of the alternative magazine Utne Reader, at the opening of the 2001 North American Cohousing Conference Friday night. 

Utne’s magazine is famous for its progressive slant and for creating the so-called Utne Reader’s salons. In 1991, the magazine editors invited their readers to participate in salons and get together with other Utne readers in their neighborhood. This initiative soon led to the creation of the Utne Reader’s Neighborhood Association, which put in contact thousands of readers across the country.  

Such salons and cohousing, which is a form of cooperative living designed to encourage neighborliness, are the natural result of human being’s natural inclination to live in communities, Utne said. 

“We realized from this salon phenomenon that we were just touching the tip of the iceberg, that there is this enormous need for community that is unrecognized by … most of Americans” he told the audience of about 300 people at UC Berkeley’s International House. “When we talk about cohousing we are talking about living the way people were meant to live.” 

Utne, who left the leadership of his magazine to his wife four years ago and is now an elementary school teacher in Minneapolis referred to a number of experts to prove his point. 

One of them is the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who told him that humans lived on the planet in tribes 99 percent of the time. Life in nuclear families only happened in times of war for survival reasons, he recalled her saying during an interview years ago.  

The flowering of human species, she said, happens in groups. 

Utne also referred to a book called “Love and Survival” by Dean Hornish. Hornish, he said, led studies showing that isolation significantly increases individuals’ risk of getting ill. According to Hornish, he said, love, intimacy and human connection are more important than factors such as diet, exercise, or genetics in human health. 

“A sense of loneliness, alienation, and lack of connection makes it 200 to 500 percent more likely that you will have a fatal disease,” he said. 

This information, he said, is why promoting face-to-face relationships and expanding the cohousing movement is critical. Utne, however, left one question unanswered: How to achieve that? 

“There 1.5 million housing starts every year and … there are 60 cohousing projects in North America. What would it take to have 10 percent of housing starts each year be cohousing?” he asked the audience. 

To Charles Durrett, one of the two architects who imported the concept of cohousing from Denmark to the United States in 1988, the expansion ofthe cohousing network will be part of an evolving cultural process. 

“I don’t think it can happen overnight,” he said after Utne’s speech. “This is an expression of democracy, a cooperation that we have to grow as a culture and it’s not going happen on the Internet. It’s going to happen face-to face.” 

Utne’s presentation was only the first of a series of events related to the Cohousing Conference that took place on UC Berkeley campus during theweekend. On Saturday, the members of the Cohousing Network, the non-profit organization sponsoring the Conference, met at the Pacific Film Archive to discuss “Ten years of Life in Cohousing.”  

On Sunday, the program featured, among other things, workshops on the development process of a cohousing project. There are currently 60 built cohousing communities and more than 100 in development in the United States and Canada.