How Coliving Spaces Promote Sustainable Communities
Sustainable communities are groups that promote sustainability as a way of life and try to contribute with their practices, not only directly but also by promoting the movement and education on it.
According to the Institute for Sustainable Communities, a sustainable community takes into account, and addresses, multiple human needs, not just one at the exclusion of all others, and manages its human, natural, and financial capital to meet current needs while ensuring that adequate resources are available for future generations.
These principles closely relate to coliving, which promotes responsible living and traveling, sharing resources and accommodation, and opening impactful topics that can make a difference.
Let’s take a closer look at how coliving spaces promote sustainable communities and why they can be so beneficial.
Promoting longer stays
Coliving spaces are one of the first accommodation concepts to promote slow traveling. Aimed at travelers, digital nomads, and remote workers, coliving spaces differ from the usual business with this customer base, like hostels, hotels, or Airbnbs, by creating the customer experience around the length of their stay.
Before coliving spaces, Airbnb was the only solution for working nomads or slow travelers who wanted to experience a place for more than a few days but less than a few months. However, in the past few years, Airbnb has ceased to provide an affordable solution and has kept its customer base around short-term stays.
Even though coliving spaces first opened their doors to accommodate the needs of the rising type of travelers - remote workers and digital nomads, they soon became promoters of slow travel as a more sustainable, environmentally-friendly way of tourism and traveling.
Most coliving spaces nowadays have a minimum stay of 10 days to 2 weeks, while many of them are focusing on mid and long-term stays, which directly excludes short-term visitors. Nevertheless, with the rise of the popularity of the concept, many people explicitly want to experience coliving, and, to do that, they have to accept a more slow-paced rhythm of traveling because of the stay policies put by coliving spaces.
Slow traveling is not just beneficial in terms of reducing one's carbon footprint by not jumping from place to place and plane to plane, it's also much richer in terms of experience for the visitor. Not many people realize this until they try it, and they often do it because of the coliving experience.
In that sense, coliving spaces are real promoters of slow traveling.
Longer Stays = More Responsible Traveling
Living somewhere for more than two weeks means you will probably settle down in the neighborhood, or even in the city if it’s a smaller one. This means you will develop a connection with your surroundings and treat it much more as your own than you would if only visiting for a few days. This will further make you more gentle, conscientious, and respectful towards your surroundings, your neighbors, etc.
Furthermore, when you’re staying somewhere for a month or two, you will probably not go into the first restaurant you find or buy souvenirs in the first souvenir shop you come by, quickly and without any research, because you will have more time to explore and find more quality experiences.
This will allow you the opportunity to see where the locals shop, discover family-owned businesses, and don’t rush into experiencing the place by following only the most commercial tourist traps.
Lastly, staying somewhere for a longer period allows you to build habits and establish a certain rhythm: leave your life like you would at home and not on a vacation. This means you will have more time to cook instead of going out which will further inspire you to buy products of higher quality, such as those from local farmers, and in that way, you will support the local economy.
Utilizing the Space to the Fullest: Promoting Efficient Land and Energy Use
First and most obvious is that coliving spaces play a significant role in promoting sustainable communities through the efficient utilization of space. By embracing shared living arrangements, coliving maximizes the use of land and energy resources, contributing to a more sustainable urban environment.
Traditional housing models often require extensive land and energy resources to accommodate individual living spaces. In contrast, coliving spaces optimize the use of available land by providing shared common areas, such as kitchens, living rooms, and workspaces. This efficient use of space allows for a higher density of residents within a smaller physical footprint, reducing the overall demand for land and associated infrastructure.
Also, coliving spaces are usually designed with careful consideration for space utilization. Innovative architectural and interior design techniques, such as multifunctional furniture, flexible room layouts, and shared amenities, make the most efficient use of available space. This design approach maximizes the functionality of each area, ensuring that spaces are multipurpose and adaptable to different residents' needs.
Resource Sharing: Reducing Overconsumption
Other than sharing the space, residents of a coliving space often share other resources as well. This goes from the general ones like electricity, heating and cooling, or water systems, to those like household items, food, or hygienic products.
People often buy things they don’t need or end up liking which lets a lot of food or products go to waste. In a coliving space, if you find you’ve cooked too much or you have a shampoo you don’t like, there is always somebody to share it with, somebody who will use it.
Especially when traveling, we often buy ingredients and food that we just end up leaving after we leave the accommodation and that often just goes to waste. In a coliving space, giving away the things you won’t take with you to other residents is often the practice. Of course, if the things are reusable, people will gladly take them and use them. This further means that if you leave some things behind and somebody else takes them, they will also not need to buy them all over again.
Coliving spaces encourage resource sharing among residents by introducing family dinners, marking shelves with shared or unused food, or even providing more sustainable products and produce by buying them locally in reusable containers.
Additionally, collaborative consumption of household items, tools, and appliances eliminates the need for multiple individual purchases, leading to reduced resource extraction and manufacturing impacts.
And lastly, coliving spaces can also provide an economic benefit directly for the residents as they often share the costs of common household items.
Living in a Community
Lastly, coliving provides its residents with a community.
Living and being a part of the community can be extremely important and valuable in building sustainable practices.
Like any other lifestyle that comes out of the box a bit, having strong social connections that support you while you're doing it is crucial in sustainable communities. Social connections allow you to discuss the processes, reassure yourself in them, share ideas, and explore solutions.
Doing something differently means there will be obstacles on the way, so having support from fellow community members or facing these challenges together might be just the push you need to cross that bridge.
This is why a coliving space with shared values can play such a valuable role in building sustainable communities.
But, that is not the only aspect coliving provides that encourages sustainability - two more and very important ones are: coliving allows you to learn to live in a community, and it gives you room to learn from your community.
Learning to live with others
Learning to live with others is a crucial aspect of sustainability because it teaches us to have common interests and goals and take selfless and mindful decisions.
This is very important for sustainability - learning to use resources in a way that will leave them for others to use as well.
Coliving doesn’t just teach us about how to share resources but also how to reduce our consumption so our fellow colivers will be able to use them after us
These surroundings don’t only have an immediate impact in the sense of saving resources for another person, but it slowly raises our awareness of the impact we leave on others and the environment in the long run.
Learning from others
Lastly, and simply, living with others lets us exchange knowledge with them.
A community is a pool of shared knowledge and being gathered around a common goal allows us to learn from one another, and exchange ideas, tips, and advice.
Sustainability as a lifestyle still doesn’t come with a hard manual and is often interpreted from different perspectives, so being able to share these perspectives and explore them together is incredibly valuable.
Moreover, coliving is not only a place that gathers people under one roof. It’s also a concept that encourages knowledge exchange and skill-sharing, and this is what makes it a perfect ground for building a sustainable community.
