Text & Slides from the 2009 Friday Keynote speech

Experiences from 36 years of living in and creating Skraplanet et.

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What we wanted to create was a type of housing for the actual reality in which we were living as opposed to the standard housing of the industrial age, which was still the most common at the time. This was a type of housing which worked very well, when women still were house wives and children were tamed. With women in the labor market, this type of housing was out.

Loneliness, isolation and fear of crime had to be extinguished, the world had to be a greener place with more time to have fun and play with others.

The population of the Kalahari dessert and the original aboriginals used a quarter of their time for work, three quarters for play, sports and singing. We use twice as much time on working despite the fact that most inventions originally were made to save time. At Skraplanet we wanted to develop from being Homo Productivos to being Homo Ludens and raise our children to be open and creative. That is from working people to playing people.

Concerning the children we have come very far – now we are anxious to see what the grand children will bring.

To be accepted in the community as an adult member no particular religion or political views were required. The only demands were to be kind, and show respect towards your neighbor.

Quite simple, but nevertheless demands that seemed so controversial, that articles were published all over the world on this specific topic. An example is from San Francisco. It looks as if there have been a revolution on Revolutionary road, the problem is that the cartoonist not seem to understand that the kick off stems from women entry into the labor market.

Love your fellow man. This was the main criteria for entering into Skraplanet in the beginning of the sixties. Together with at the slogan: children must have 100 parent and later on break the walls down.

The following three months we divided the interested people in common activity groups and we developed the following set of program:

We do not accept architect slogans such as: Less is more, more is a bore, and so on, you all know them. They are all dealing with form, but form means a lot for the human behavior and the well being of humans – so we chose to see form as the intermediary of human contact.

The possibility of at least 3.5 intimate friends for both adults and children the possibility of visiting each other without calling first – neither on the telephone nor the door (in this period psychology was the new religion and Harrow had proven scientifically that in order to avoid neurosis a person should have at least 3.5 intimate friends). In order to make simpler, to actually see, who was at home and open for a visit, we planned half public paths close to all the houses. With just a small little tap on the window you could signalize contactto a good friend and make an appointment for a petanque game without including telephone, doorbells or disturbances of the family.

The children should have attractive playgrounds for different ages, they should have the possibility of building their own hit house for loud music, dig in the ground.

There should be no cars near the playground areas to make it safer for small children (small children normally do not move more than 50 meters from there house). In all there should be more space for playground areas for basketball, football and a swimming pool (also to reduce the gasoline consumption and the co2 and avoid long car queues to the beach with screaming children in the car).

The pool and especially the common sauna is a must for creating a stable intimate contact. Places where the way of talking is completely different than when you dine together at the common dinners. Jacob proposed to take it even further and place the pool in order to make a view from the bar directly to see the naked women run from the sauna to the pool for the cold shudder. Well, we agreed to build in dissolved levels in order to make it possible for all rooms in the dwelling to have attractive views. To see something fascinating from each room. An excellent cure towards loneliness. And it actually worked out perfect. But apart from this we also wanted: a common dining room, common kitchen, children’s indoor play area in connection with the dining area, but separated sound wise. A music room, a bar, a common room for lectures, a theatre stage, open air theatre, workshop for wood, metal and ceramics, a bicycle workshop, storage room with space for common groceries – a sauna, a cinema, dart, billiard, etc., etc.

It is not possible to neither pay for nor have space for all this in a normal standard house, but if you have 33 economies to finance it, its possible.

Dwellings divided in three zones – children, adult and common. The possibility of absolute privacy and community. Crated by dividing into zones so that the toilet and the parents bedroom were situated with access to the living room, from where you could see the common room with the kitchen and at the same time see who was outside the house without anybody being able to look into the living room.

2 public, but not the other way around was gained having 1/3 springs in the houses. The houses more open with large glass areas, so they seem more transparent, all this together avoids theft and vandalism. We have never had this problem and only one single time did we have youngsters party, the thief was found and he excused himself by claiming that the stereo rack was in a public space. From that day we decided always to have at least one adult at the teenage parties.

The large glass areas are turned against south in order to optimize their solar collector function and reduce the CO2. Vegetable gardens and many large trees, because they are beautiful and they use the CO2. We also wanted to build a wind mill, but the municipality wouldn’t allow it because of the noise.

Finally, we wanted each room to have an entrance from the outside in order to make the houses as flexible as possible, so that a family could live in more houses if needed—which became the situation for various families. Instead of using the most common placing of the dwellings around a large common square, we made a structure of three large common squares for everybody (party square, youth square and children’s square).
It can be rather difficult for 33 families to agree on the use of the common area, therefore we put four houses around the common areas, and these four houses could decide the use of this area. This has made a very flexible solution where the functions vary a lot: small zoo with goats and rabbits, children’s playground, an old boat, aeroplane, place for bonfire, badminton and a trampoline, etc.

The detailed programming was performed without big difficulties. It lasted about three months and we arranged several parties and architectural trips to know each other better and find consensus concerning the style of the housing and the materials.

Unfortunately, the surrounding world was far from mature enough for our ideas. It lasted more than ten years to realize the first project. Almost everybody was against the project. Because of the ongoing crises in that period the banks withdraw their loans and the real estate appraisers argued that the price on the houses would drop if there we build a common house.

They finally valued the common house to 0-zero kroner. Fortunately we bribed the value to put the cost of the common house on each of the dwellings, in order to get the loan we needed. Today cohousing is accepted and appreciated and today the communities can be created and built within a year if we again get a social democratic governor. Who is for cohousing.

?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? original group left for moving in. It took about one week to sell the rest of the dwellings.

Beforehand we were not sure what the exact price would be, so we made a list of priorities of our wishes, which turned out to be extremely important, because the result of the tendering was one third higher than we could afford.

First we managed by cancelling the cellar and the garden walls. And we created equal basis houses instead of having 3 different types. We also made the entire outdoor work ourselves. The final result was that the price of each of the houses plus a common house was one fifth cheaper than a standard house.

I find it interesting that only one of all the houses later on have been extended with a garden wall. The more people get to know each other, the more they want to see and be in contact with each other. Breaking down the walls, is a very good slogan for cohousing. But we also made an effort to associate with each other. The idea of having theatre possibilities was an extremely good idea and it is the direct course of the extremely few changes in the people living in Skraplanet during the past 37 years. Each year we still have the new years cabaret where everybody experience to be teased a bit. And more or less everybody has participated in some theatre play – The last play was called: “Hurray it’s a girl”.

The harvest party of each year which lasts for two days and offers cave circus, where even the smallest children (nowadays mostly grand children) performs. The circus director who now is 78 years old, converts the smallest gag into an international performance. After the traditional harvest speech in the afternoon and dancing around the lime tree at the main squire, the children make their small shops with mouse circus, rodeo, fortune tellers, and the adults sell candy, coffee, cakes and beers after having eaten the roasted wild pig in open air. Then there is dancing into the bright morning light. In the morning we have breakfast together with pool show, where couples must pass each other on a thin plank on the pool without touching. And, finally, the football matches, where men are dressed like women an women like men. These traditions are from the beginning of Skraplanet and are followed today without the need of big preparations. Once a month we have a cultural evening, where everything can happen; for instance, we have film creators telling about their movies and showing them (for a bottle of red wine), or a lawyer telling about the hearings after the second world war, or a sax player performing. Each cultural evening begins with a festive dinner.

Furthermore, it is a tradition that round birthdays are being celebrated on stage with songs and funny costumes. Once I was dressed as a vacuum cleaner, but it was ????

Since we were pioneers on the common house, we were not sure about the use of this house. Therefore, we made it too small; it is only about 350 m@, but today it is still in use almost every day. There is only space for about 60 sitting persons; Therefore we make regular dining groups for each day of the week except weekends which are for common arrangements.

I have been dining with almost the same group every Monday and Thursday for 37 years. And I cook once every second month for this group. I cook what I feel like and I am pretty much aware of how many participants I can count on, because they writer their name in a book the day before. There are no menu or money involved – the food is a surprise each time. This rather relaxed system has worked for 37 years and many cohousing groups envy us, because they often have very complex systems of dining together.

The common house was finished a few months later than the dwellings and therefore a brilliant idea accidentally rose. We didn’t want to await for the finishing of the common house, so we agreed to eat together at four houses each Sunday in the private dwellings and this arrangement has continued ever since. Four people let the computer decide who shall eat together in such a way that everybody has been eating together during one and a half years. An ideal system for the re-creation of friendships which may have suffered a little damage because of diverting ideas of for instance a tree that takes too much light or a playground house which ended up bigger than planned, etc.

In the beginning we had common meetings each week. Then it became each month. Today it is every second month. Quite fast we became tired of discussing to obtain total agreement and went over to democracy and majority votes. If we need to buy something that costs more than 20 dollars there must be a majority of four fifths, it could for instance be the building of a sauna or asphalting the paths.

We have only had one revolution:

At the beginning we created so called duty work hire groups to take care of common jobs: there was a pool group, a free space group, a common house group, a cleaning group, a group for the newspaper. Our ????? newspaper is very important. To begin with we had a board in the common house for notes and information, but very often people missed important notes and therefore a weekly magazine was created to copy all the information, jokes and so on. Each week for 36 years this newspaper has been handed out and it means a lot for the common feeling of being together.

Well, I came from the duty groups. There were ten persons in a duty group, adults telling which group they belonged to. A duty group lasted for 3 months then you changed groups. This was a very good arrangement, because everybody was forced to do work, we at first would avoid it because it seemed very boring. It lasted 7 years. This working together everything became interesting. But after several months of uproar the principle of lust were decided and strangely enough it has been working ever since except for the cleaning of the common house which everybody must participate in every eighth Sunday. There are 16 lust groups.
I build kites with the children once a month when they get home from school. The musicians teach the kids to play, the bakers to make cakes and my wife helps with Spanish. Each month has their experience for the children. Unfortunately many children have now left home.

At the beginning we had many strange parties for instance you should find your dinner partner by finding the woman who smelled of licorice or the one who lacked the shoe – all this without talking. It worked as it should: we got to know each other very well.

The only demands we have to new owners is that they should participate in a common meeting. The demand on the seller is that they sell to people with children – preferably small ones.

38 years later

Many silver and golden weddings. We avoid admitting it, but today we have become a senior community. But still we have many traditions and rituals together with children and grand children every year: canoe rides, Amazon trips, hiking with tents in the woods, harvest circus and so on.

Death is not taboo and we discuss openly what is a dignified way to leave life. With references to both the Buddhists and the Indians way of finding a good day for dying. We almost all agree that we should be burned and our ashes should be scattered in our river. We have had three deaths and funerals in the common house. Two died after being quite ill for quite some time in their house, where they were nursed by their neighbors. The common house has also served very well on numerous name giving celebrations and weddings.

Living in Skraplanet is very much like the way it used to be in the beginning only the pace is a little slower. It is amazing that so many of the traditions that we started out during the first years still are vital and inspiring for everybody. We also introduced new traditions during the years: we rented a summer residence n Jutland or on the island of Bornholm, the children spent the entire summer there and the adults went to and from. To make vacation together became so popular that we bought a summer residence together in the south of the island Seeland.

????????????????????? before 1978 10 cohousing projects had been built, all with the same concept degree and ????????????. For me it was clear that it could not be otherwise so long the start was a certain site. Because of that I started a club for people who wish to live in cohousing. They formed groups before they decided upon a site but after ??? for how collective they wanted to be. Like 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation.

Kilen
Egologerg????

The ??? was called Sambo wish in Danish means living together and a magazine with status??? was turned out ever month.

From an investigation I know that 28% of Danish population wanted to live in green cohousing, but only very few had energy to become imitators. For the future of the world, it is important that as many as possible live in cohousing and work for a more green and sustainable future. Because of that I started to convince city planners and community politicians about the idea and showed them how they could make local plans for broadacre sites which could make space for 30 houses and a common house. 3 communities in Denmark…