Environmental Psychology Meets Cohousing: Designing for Connection

There is something that happens when we feel held and supported. The shoulders drop. The breath deepens. We find ourselves lingering at a doorway, leaning into a conversation we hadn't planned to have. Something in us recognizes: I can be here. I can be myself here. A well-designed space can do that: it can hold and support.

This is not an accident. It is designed, though not the kind we usually talk about: Not aesthetics, not efficiency, not even sustainability, though all of these matter. It is a design that remembers that humans are creatures who come alive in connection, who wither in isolation, who need both the warmth of belonging and the quiet of solitude to become themselves fully.

Cohousing begins here. It asks a simple question: what if we designed our homes not just for living, but for living together?

What the Science of Wellbeing Tells Us

After decades of study, we know that the strongest predictor of human flourishing is not wealth, achievement, or status — it is the quality of our relationships. Feeling that we belong. Feeling that we matter. Feeling that if we disappeared, someone would come looking.

A comprehensive scoping review by Carrere and colleagues, published in Public Health Reviews (2020), examined 77 cohousing communities worldwide. The findings were consistent: residents experienced less loneliness, a stronger sense of community, and three distinct forms of social support — instrumental (practical help), emotional (someone to confide in), and recreational (shared activities and celebration).

In Vancouver, Happy Cities documented the transformation at Our Urban Village, a cohousing community that opened in 2023. Six months after move-in, nearly every resident reported feeling lonely rarely or never — compared to 40% before. Everyone reported weekly or daily conversations with neighbours. Everyone felt comfortable asking for help.

These are not small shifts. This is what becomes possible when design serves human connection.

What Meaningful Connection Actually Requires

Connection is not simply the frequency of contact. We can live surrounded by people and still feel profoundly alone.

Meaningful connection asks something of us. It asks for presence, for vulnerability, for truth rather than pleasantries. It is built slowly — through repeated encounters, through small risks of honesty, through showing up again and again until trust builds like sediment, layer upon layer.

Design cannot manufacture this. But it can create the conditions that make it possible.

The Spontaneous Encounter

Jo Williams' foundational research on cohousing and social interaction (2005) identified something important: the casual, unplanned encounter matters as much as the formal gathering. The neighbour you pass on the pathway. The wave through a window that becomes an invitation for tea. The conversation that wasn't scheduled but happened anyway, because the space allowed for it.

Williams called these "low-stakes interactions." They build familiarity before intimacy. They cannot be forced or programmed. They can only be made possible by pathways that curve rather than cut straight, by benches placed where people might pause, by courtyards visible from the spaces of daily life, but design a space for mystery, for the unknown, to bring delight.

The design question becomes: does this space invite lingering, or rushing through? Does it invite predictability and boredom or spontaneity and excitement?

The Intentional Gathering

And then there is the other kind of connection — the shared meal, the meeting, the celebration. These need different spaces.

The common house matters deeply. Its position on the site, whether daily life flows through it or around it. Its kitchen — generous enough for many hands, designed for the choreography of cooking together, for children to participate. Its table — long enough to hold everyone, intimate enough that no one feels lost. Its acoustics — allowing both the roar of laughter and the quiet conversation in the corner.

Research on cohousing design consistently points to the common house as the heart of community life. When it works, it becomes the place where strangers become neighbours, and neighbours become something closer to family.

Privacy as Foundation

Here is the paradox at the heart of community: we cannot truly connect if we have no ground to stand on.

Privacy is not the opposite of togetherness — it is its foundation. We need places to retreat, to restore, to integrate. Rooms where the door closes completely. Spaces where no one can see in. Time alone with ourselves.

Without this, the social self becomes performance. We show up depleted. We give from empty.

Angela Sanguinetti's research on transformational practices in cohousing (2014) found that connection to community and connection to self operate in parallel — both essential, both requiring space. The design task is not to maximize togetherness, but to support the full rhythm of human life: reaching out and drawing in, engaging and retreating, the breath of community.

Thresholds and Choice

Layering and nuancing the gradient from private to shared is quite important; it provides choice and control.

A front porch is neither inside nor outside — it is an invitation that can be declined. A window seat facing the courtyard offers a connection without obligation. The bench halfway between your door and the common house creates a middle ground, a place to pause and choose.

Recent research using space syntax analysis (2025) confirms what residents intuit: spatial configuration directly affects privacy gradients — how much control people have over their own visibility and accessibility. Communities that offer this control thrive. Those who don't see residents withdraw.

The door that closes. The curtain that draws. The path that leads away from the centre. These are not failures of the community. They are its protection.

Safety as the Unspoken Foundation

Beneath all the design principles lies something fundamental: we cannot be vulnerable where we do not feel safe.

Safety speaks through design in ways we sense before we understand. Materials that feel honest rather than fake, light that warms rather than exposes. Acoustics that hold a conversation without broadcasting it. Scale that honours the human body and space that welcomes all bodies and abilities.

When these elements align, the nervous system settles. We stop bracing. We begin to trust — not just the people, but the place itself.

Designing for the Whole Human Being

Cohousing at its best does not force connection. It does not eliminate privacy or demand participation. It asks a different question: what would it look like to design for the full human being?

For our need to be seen and our need to be hidden. For our longing to belong and our longing to be alone. For the self that reaches toward others and the self that requires solitude to know what it has to offer.

The answers will differ for every community, every site, every gathering of people finding their way toward shared life. But the question itself is a kind of homecoming, returning us to something we have always known: that we are made for connection, and that the spaces we design and build can help us find our way back to one another.

With Joy and Delight!

nora bouz