A-3.3

Co-living Models in Asia and Community Development

鍾偉強 副教授
香港港專學院

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​Abstract

Since the last decades, a concept, co-living, has emerged and aroused enormous interests in most cities globally. Due to outrageous rental costs, many regard co-living as the last resort to meet housing needs for those who couldn’t afford to own or rent a decent place to live. However, some further advocate co-living as an alternative mean to create an intentional community that could nurture communal life with strong social bonds among the members of the community. The former, which is pragmatic in nature, uses co-living to fulfil personal goals (e.g. to overcome financial constraints), while the latter, which is idealistic in nature, places heavy emphasis on achieving social goals (e.g. to create social cohesion in the community). At some point, idealistic co-living could even be considered as a social movement in looking for alternative lifestyle in a capitalist society. Instead of simply providing a shelter, more and more are stepping up the effort in putting idealistic co-living into practice. What is the most effective model of idealistic co-living? How to develop idealistic co-living? What are the factors that could facilitate the emergence of co-living? This paper is to provide a theoretical discussion on what co-living is, and to identify the conditions that could facilitate the realization of co-living. We are going to look at three cases: the Blue House in Hong Kong, the 9th Floor Co-living Apartment in Taiwan, and the Sungmisan Village in Seoul to illustrate what the factors are that could make these cases possible. We argue that there is no one particular kind of idealistic co-living. Each society may develop distinctive models of co-living as a result of the variations in social conditions. There will be variations even within the same society with different attributes and goals to meet. We conclude that the scalability of co-living for community development does not lie in one single model, but could be created by a variety of models joining together to make social change as an ultimate goal.
 
Introduction：“Living together, living better”

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