Pérdida por multitrayecto

I have mentioned how some interviewees expressed their belief in community living as a positive way of life, linked to dissatisfaction with conventional life (Chapter 6, page 116). For some interviewees, this was woven in with practical and political reasoning, as well as an emotional attachment to their specific community:

The reason I carry on living here is cos I can't imagine not living in a Co-op. I'm really committed to Co-operative housing, well Co-ops in general. Um, I just can’t ever imagine giving my money to a landlord and I certainly don't ever want to buy a house, so you know, it's kind of like where I should be and this is a well-settled Co-op and I can't think of another Co-op that would give me the same kind of thing... (Interviewee 16; Community

6)

Another interviewee expressed how happiness and fulfilment were part and parcel of their commitment to their community and to this way of life:

I continue to live here because I’m happy here. It’s [pause] fulfils a lot, a lot of my needs. I’m very committed to the place, um. I’m quite proud of it, um. I think there’s an

alternative side to me that quite enjoys that alternative way of life, a bit unconventional

(Interviewee 11; Community 5)

Interviewees also revealed some of the challenges they had faced in maintaining this commitment: being perceived as ‘wacky’ or eccentric, or feeling judged unfairly by others. Interviewee 7 talked about how other parents in the school that her son attended held onto ‘myths about what happens up here’. She talked about how these perceptions made her angry and how she felt other parents were immature in the way they sensationalised what might be happening in the community.

Another interviewee described how, in the early years of the community being set up, she had overheard two people talking about the community whilst queuing in the local shop:

I was about 4th in the queue and she said 'Ooh have you seen that lot over there? They're all wife-swapping and taking drugs!' and I said 'Excuse me, I live there and I'm missing out on this...' (both laugh) can I just explain what’s, there's not very many 'wives' in the street, um if there's drug-taking going on it's definitely not come to my notice, most of us are parents of some kind, or we're just getting on with our lives sharing looking after the houses, no different to you living in your street.' So I think once people started to understand it just took us to explain... Um my children went to the local school and they got ribbed a bit to start off with but that didn't last long. (Interviewee 17; Community 6)

This example was taken from the past – in the late 1970s when the community was first set up - and local perceptions had changed considerably over time as the community had become more woven into the fabric of the local area and the community had become more conventional (also quote on page 123 about how the kinds of members they recruited had become more

conventional). Other interviewees in this community talked about how they were no longer referred to as ‘hippy street’ and were more often referred to as ‘pretty street’ now because of the well preserved traditional features of the fronts of their houses.

Of course, the stigmas associated with living alternatively varied according to the degree to which the community itself was constituted around conventional versus radical notions of home and household formation. As described in Chapter 5, the CoHousing communities were built around a model of individual home ownership, where everyone had their own front door it was noticeable none of the interviewees from these two communities talked about being stigmatised.

In contrast, the experience of interviewee 2, living in the squat/eco-village, was one in which members had to deal with much more negative perceptions of the community. There was, however, some variation in the reception that they had received from local neighbours and landowners, once they had realised the group’s occupation of the land was peaceful and respectful. Members of this community also had to deal with the threat of physical violence on occasions, either from bailiffs, or from groups of local people coming onto the land (since there was no secure perimeter to their community). Interviewee 2 told me about how he had been intimidated and pushed around by a group of young people who had come looking for trouble one night, but he was sanguine and philosophical about it, seeing the young men as acting out of ignorance and refused to be intimidated by it into moving on.

Resilience to the stigma associated with living unconventionally was more often a subtle business and one interviewee was very aware of the tension in her life between her idealism and notions of respectability. Interviewee 18 talked about how coming back to living in a community had

revived her idealism. At the time of the interview, she had been living for just eight months in the housing Co-op, having spent around 20 years bringing up her children in more conventional housing settings. The Co-op she lived in was one of the youngest communities in this research and I have shown how they struggled financially to keep the community afloat (Chapter 5, page 92) and to try and improve the building, which had previously been owned by an institution. She talked about how the rough edges of the buildings appearance and decor had not deterred her from moving in:

so aesthetically it’s pretty patchy um… I think that would put a lot of people off. I’ve got friends who couldn’t possibly bear to share a bathroom with somebody else. The kitchen, it’s actually perfectly clean but it looks awful and it’s freezing cold in winter. But when I came I didn’t see any of that. I did see that, I did think ‘Gawd blimey!’ when I looked at the ceilings and the strip lights, but much more than that what I saw was the potential here. And I had really forgotten about my very left-wing up-bringing and those years in the squat where we were… those years in the 1970s of idealism and peace and love and flower power as the 70s progressed and we were moving towards the Thatcher years and the whole peace love thing was disintegrating slowly. Still there was a lot of idealism about living together also about getting back to the land and stuff like that and when I came here I’d kind of forgotten all, you know, that person that I used to be. (Interviewee

18; Community 7).

I see a number of important themes combined together in this quote. There was her individual sense of agency expressed in her seeing of the potential for a home in the place; she refused to judge the place by what she recognises as conventional standards and expectations (a lot of people would be ‘put off’ by how the home looks). There was resilience and optimism in the face of the challenges of the community to make their home comfortable and homely, her connection to her more idealistic youth and the values of counterculture that informed her younger years and her pride in ‘actually doing something to create ‘a model for urban living’. Additionally, she didn’t feel exploited by paying high rents to a private landlord; she felt part of ‘cutting edge stuff’ and was excited about this aspect.

So successful community living involved balancing commitment to an alternative way of life, with dealing with the stigma associated with adopting a different lifestyle. This balancing was also evident in how some interviewees talked about how they managed interpersonal boundaries and personal space.