Happier families: new ways of living

Photographs Jan Søndergaard

A bearded older gentleman sitting opposite me at our long table introduces himself. Niels Kryger, 77, is a retired educational anthropologist. “The noise level can be a challenge,” he shouts, as I pass him the fish cakes. “But it’s young life, so…” He tells me Grønne Eng has far exceeded his expectations. “A good atmosphere. Good people.”

Grønne Eng, or “Green Meadow”, is a multi-storey quadrangle of 75 apartments and terraced houses located on the edge of Ørestad, a newer city quarter in south Copenhagen. When I visit on a sunny day in August, it looks much like the other developments out here, with cargo bikes cluttering the entrance arch, balconies bedecked with barbecues, and a courtyard garden where mini-Danes hare about. But this is a bofællesskab – literally “living community” – and it is home to 186 people who have chosen a more collective, shared way of living. It is the largest of around 600 such co-housing developments in Denmark, a form of living that has seen a significant increase in popularity there over the past decade. I want to see if there are lessons for the rest of us in how thousands of Danes are choosing to live. Could this form of communal living offer solutions to some of the most intractable problems facing our societies, from urban isolation and generational siloing to the mental-health epidemic and childcare crisis?

According to 2023 government figures, almost a third of British households are now single-person dwellings. The number of people living alone was 8.4 million as of last year, up from 7.9 million 10 years earlier. By far the greatest increase is among the over-65s, while lone parenting has increased by almost 10% since 2013. Meanwhile, although nursery costs have decreased in the past year, in 2022 the UK ranked fourth highest in terms of overall childcare costs in the OECD: consuming nearly a fifth of the average wage.

Living more communally could offer solutions to all of these issues. Denmark, admittedly, has much cheaper childcare, but it does suffer from similar issues concerning loneliness and mental health, which is one explanation for why communal living is on the rise. The country has been the world leader in communal living ever since the first bofællesskab was founded in 1968, when architect Jan Gudmand-Høyer built the Sættedammen commune in Hillerød, north of Copenhagen. A growing spirit of individualism, coupled with the fast-growing wealth in Denmark, led to a decline in communal living in the 1980s and 90s. But since the global economic crisis of 2008, co-housing societies have made a comeback. According to the Danish Commune Association, more than 12,000 Danes live in a bofællesskab. Another 7,000 are on waiting lists.

Grønne Eng, which welcomed its first residents in June 2023, represents the latest wave of Danish shared living, characterised by larger, more professionally run projects created in close consultation with their owner-occupiers. It is the fourth project by developer EcoVillage, which was co-founded by Rikke Søndler.

“When I was growing up, some of my friends lived in co-housing and I always thought that would be my preferred way to have kids when I grew up,” says Rikke, 48, who lives in Grønne Eng with her family. Instead, like many Copenhageners when they have their first child, she moved to suburban Copenhagen, in a detached house with high hedges, isolated from her neighbours. “We’d lost the great social connections we had in the city centre,” she says, “and so I started looking for plots of land to create a bofællesskab of my own.”

Rikke makes the founding of a co-housing project sound as simple as arranging a playdate for her three-year-old, but raising the DKK300m (roughly £35m) for EcoVillage to build Grønne Eng was a precarious adventure. “We got that first plot of land in 2017, and the money fell through three times before we finally started building in 2021,” she says. “But when I’m sitting up in the dining room, it’s worth all the grey hairs.”

Another resident, architect Andreas Skytte Hvid – father of the table-tennis enthusiasts – has kindly offered to show me around today. There are impressive shared spaces: a fully equipped workshop, a children’s playroom, guest rooms, a central garden, a laundrette, even a music studio. Our tour ends at the rooftop deck, which has a spacious orangery. It has one of the best views I have ever seen in Copenhagen, out across Kalvebod Fælled, an expansive nature zone running down to the sea. Like a Danish savannah, but with cows instead of giraffes.

As the sun sets beside the city-centre spires, we sit on a picnic bench to talk money. Ownership of properties here comes in two forms: conventional purchase with or without a mortgage, or andel (meaning “share”), a Danish form of cooperative housing in which owners share the mortgage on their part of the building. Prices for apartments ranged from DKK1.2m to DKK5.4m (£140,000 to £630,000), which is slightly above average for the city in terms of square-metre price, but less when you factor in all the shared facilities.

Grønne Eng is typical of current trends in that it strives for cross-generational co-living. The oldest resident is 80, the youngest are… well, four babies are currently due. Socio-economically things are a little more homogeneous, with the majority being graduates and professionals who (according to an anonymous poll) vote for Enhedslisten, the quasi-communist party. There is no official screening procedure. “My brother and I are human screeners,” explained Rikke (her brother is a co-founder). “We talk to everyone who wants to live here, and if somebody really doesn’t care about the community, if they only care about their own house, we’ll say, ‘Are you sure this is for you?’”

At the heart of Grønne Eng is the communal dining, or fællesspisning, which takes place Monday to Thursday at 6pm and costs 50kr (£5.80) per adult and 20kr (£2.30) per child. Andreas and his family have invited me to dine at their table. Like many residents, they were involved in planning Grønne Eng prior to its construction, helping pick the Heynabo (“Hey Neighbour”) app which facilitates communication between residents, and agreeing on the monthly meetings where new initiatives require a 75% majority. Upkeep of the complex is divided into zones, they tell me, each with a committee and budget, but there is also an annual cleaning day, rebranded as the “Cleaning Festival”, with live music, food and drink; and twice a year, tyre-changing day, when the vehicles in the car-sharing scheme switch to winter or summer tyres.

Danes love communal singing, usually from Denmark’s best-selling book, the Højskolesangbogen (Folk High School Song Book), and so dinner starts with a singalong. This is where things might start to seem a little cult-like, particularly as many of the songs in the book are hymns, but I have lived in Denmark on and off for 20 years, and am always braced for it. Communal singing is just something the Danes do. “It has a calming effect,” says Andreas, sharing the lyrics with me on his phone. “Like, now it’s time to eat.”

Once the song is finished (all six verses), the food is served by other residents who are on kitchen duty that day. “It’s not compulsory to eat together,” Andreas hastens to point out. You are free to take your food back to your home, but it is compulsory to participate in preparing the food and cleaning up, on a rota basis.

Today it is those Danish-style fish cakes with grated carrot, baked potatoes and tzatziki. “It was a really steep learning curve at the beginning,” admits Andreas. “But people can choose to do washing up. They don’t have to take responsibility for the food.”

There was some scepticism that such a large bofællesskab could function, but Andreas saw only positives in its scale. “Always with communes there will be the usual suspects who don’t do so much, and others who do all the work,” he says. “But with more people you don’t notice.”

Perhaps now I should admit that my own experience of Danish communal living brought out the very worst in me. When my Danish wife and I had our first child, the suburban breeding grounds beckoned with their car ports, neat hedges and a trampoline in every garden. We ended up in a common arrangement of a detached house split into two apartments with a shared garden and basement for laundry and storage. Our co-sharers were nice, decent, reasonable people, but I came to resent the very sight of them, fretted over the shared electricity and heating bills, and grew irritated out of all proportion by their clumping footsteps on the floorboards overhead.

I am not proud of any of this, but as I tour Grønne Eng and meet its residents, even I am starting to be convinced, not just by the environmental benefits of sharing resources, but also because we all know that building social connections is key to wellbeing and longevity. Another thing I notice is the exceptional social skills of the children. At dinner, I have proper conversations with two under-10s, conversations which were initiated by them. I don’t think I started a conversation with an adult until I was, I don’t know, 20? Clearly, growing up surrounded by so many friendly adults works wonders on one’s interactional skills. But how much of all this is transferable and how much is inherently Danish?

Paradoxically, though the Danes often rank rock-bottom on international lists when it comes to the ease with which outsiders can befriend them, they are exceptionally sociable among themselves. It’s not just hygge – the Danish craving for conviviality is about more than knitwear and scented candles. Working together, living in communities, joining organisations, clubs, group work – all of this is drilled into them from their very first interactions with the state and education system. Danes belong to more clubs and unions, and do more voluntary work than any other nation. What’s more, they have the highest trust levels in the world in their government and institutions, but also in each other – and, perhaps unsurprisingly, regularly rank towards the top of happiness surveys. One word, samfundssind, literally “society-minded”, came to epitomise Danish social cohesion, particularly during the Covid pandemic.

The British “my home is my castle” ethos, on the other hand, might seem rather antithetical to the communal mentality. Grønne Eng co-founder Rikke studied political science in the UK, knows us well, and is confident that there would be a market in the UK: “It isn’t unique to the Danes. You know, only maybe 20% of the Danish population would want to live like this; 80% would pay a lot not to live close to other people. Visitors come here and see we aren’t all hippies, we have jobs and lives.”

After dinner, retired couple Peter and Hannah invite me to see their top-floor apartment together with Andreas. When they were thinking of downscaling from their large apartment, they drew up a list: they wanted to be close to nature, but also to the city, to be environmentally friendly, and to be in a cross-generational community. “I am not suited to a nuclear family,” said Hannah. The couple do not have children of their own and so a major draw here was the number of youngsters around them.

We enter their flat from an outdoor landing, straight into their living room/kitchenette. “Usually, the first rooms in an apartment like this might be an entrance hall and bathroom, but here the idea is to soften the transition between private and public,” explains Andreas, who works for Vandkunsten, the local architecture studio which designed Grønne Eng. In practice, the apartment layout means you can make eye contact with your neighbours and judge better when to knock on their door, making people more approachable even in their homes.

I might have begun to twitch a little here. “You can draw your curtains, of course,” Andreas assured me. But he conceded you are a little more at the mercy of other residents’ personalities and moods: “You don’t really know someone until you see them on a Monday evening after a tough day at work. People need to know what they are getting into, of course, but we have become like a family.” People do not move out of Grønne Eng lightly, adds Hannah. Only three of the original residents have left so far; 12 more have been born.

If you still aren’t convinced, let me tell you something else which astounded me: many of the residents of Grønne Eng holiday together, too. Andreas’s family has just been to Greece with Anne-Sofie’s family. Rikke tells me later that she has been to stay with her Czech/Swiss next-door neighbours in their summer house. And, later this year, 36 residents will go skiing together in Norway. They can’t get enough of each other.

Grønne Eng was beginning to seem almost utopian. “For me, yes, it is a utopia,” said Rikke with surprisingly little hesitation. “You live as part of something bigger than you, it reinforces a positive view of humanity, makes you more tolerant. There isn’t any other way I’d rather live.”

Michael Booth is the author The Almost Nearly Perfect People (Vintage Publishing, £10.99). Order a copy at observershop.co.uk for £9.89

By Matt Alagiah

Marmalade Lane: tackling the UK’s ‘latent demand’ for more co-housing

On a recent sunny afternoon, 19 of the inhabitants of Marmalade Lane, an intergenerational co-housing scheme north of Cambridge, went for a walk along the River Great Ouse. “The youngest person was two; the oldest was my husband, who is 86,” says Jenny Borden, a resident and longtime campaigner for co-housing.

Marmalade Lane was completed in 2019 and is made up of 42 homes, a mix of terraced houses and apartments, housing 75 adults and 30 children. It is often held up as a model for the benefits of co-housing, both for the environment and for residents’ health and wellbeing. Homeowners share facilities, from a veg garden to bookable guest bedrooms and a tool workshop. There are communal dinners throughout the week. For Meredith Bowles, principal at Mole Architects, the practice that designed the scheme in collaboration with the homeowners, the most unusual aspect is the pedestrianised central street. “Take the cars out,” he says, “and immediately there are kids playing and people chatting in a place that feels safe.”

Jonny Anstead is co-founder of Town, the purpose-driven developer behind Marmalade Lane and several other schemes. He says there is “huge latent demand” for co-housing in the UK, because it provides answers to “real societal issues, like how we reduce loneliness, live more sustainably, age better, and feel more supported in our neighbourhoods.” Town is currently working on multiple schemes across the country, including in Norwich, Northstowe, Milton Keynes and Hemel Hempstead.

Hobelwerk, Zurich: At the housing crisis peak, thrifty Swiss communities thrive

If you think the UK has a housing crisis, wait until you hear about Zurich. According to Swiss government statistics, the city’s vacancy rate is around 0.07%, meaning that only seven out of every 10,000 apartments are empty and available to rent. Demand for space is sky-high, and so are rents. “The housing crisis has reached a peak,’”says Michael Loss. He works for the non-profit housing co-operative Mehr Als Wohnen (More Than Living), which believes it is part of the solution. Its latest scheme, Hobelwerk, just outside Zurich, opened in 2023 on the site of a former wood-processing factory. Today, there are five buildings housing 158 apartments and around 400 people. “We aren’t profit- or margin-driven, which keeps rents low,” says Loss. Rents within Hobelwerk are up to 70% cheaper than those in developments owned by profit-driven institutions like banks, he says.

But Hobelwerk isn’t just about affordability; it’s also a site of experimentation into new forms of co-living. Across the scheme, there is an array of shared spaces, including a vast covered square, where kids play and hobby groups meet up; and a communal hall that hosts cinema evenings. There’s even a shared sauna (built using wood left behind from the original factory).

Architect Pascal Flammer, who designed one of the buildings, Haus D, created a range of Clusterwohnungen (“cluster apartments”), where residents share spaces, including living rooms, kitchens and bathrooms. “Bringing people together was a key idea,” he says. “People feel more lonely than ever, so we wanted to create communities.”

Additional images: David Butler