Our Urban Village Cohousing
Cohousing lite: An innovative project with Tomo Spaces offers a promising solution to Vancouver’s housing and social isolation crises.
Our Urban Village unit entrances face onto shared, social outdoor walkways overlooking the courtyard. (Matheson Photography)
Can we design multi-family housing to nurture strong, supportive social relationships? Hundreds of hours of research led us to believe the answer is yes. Our Urban Village (formerly called Tomo House) brings this idea to life.
Happy Cities engaged in a unique collaboration with an enlightened developer (Tomo Spaces), a creative design team (Lanefab and MA+HG Architects), and a group of future residents determined to find an affordable, pragmatic path to cohousing (Our Urban Village). Through this project, Happy Cities worked with the design team and Our Urban Village to provide:
Design principles for wellbeing to guide the design and development of the project
A post-occupancy study, comparing residents’ wellbeing before and after move in, to identify how living in community-oriented housing can nurture health, belonging, social connection, and more
Tomo House.
Project architects, Marianne Amodio and Harley Grusko.
About Our Urban Village
Our Urban Village is a group of families who wanted the benefits of cohousing without the financial and time burdens that often come with traditional cohousing approaches. They invented a phrase, “cohousing lite,” to describe their dream. Happy Cities introduced the group to Tomo Spaces, who offered to help make that dream a reality.
Tomo, which stands for “together + more,” reflects the project’s guiding ideals. As housing prices rise faster than income, many families cannot afford traditional single-family homes. They are looking for new housing choices somewhere between single-family homes and high-rise condos. We believe that affordability, sociability, and sustainability goals are interconnected and work together in a virtuous cycle.
The project embodies lessons from hundreds of hours of Happy Cities research on wellbeing in multi-unit housing. It combines a small cluster of homes with indoor and outdoor social spaces, including a common house and courtyard. It reduces parking burden, because folks who share don’t own as many cars. It reflects the aspirations of a deeply committed community of future residents.
Our Urban Village offers a new housing choice—in its building form, tenure model, and social wellbeing approach—that we think is scalable and reproducible in many neighbourhoods.
Learning from community housing article series:
Our Urban Village draws inspiration from community housing models, like cohousing and co-operative housing.
Tomo Spaces and Happy Cities interviewed people from several local cohousing and co-op buildings to hear first-hand what makes them such wonderful places to live. Based on our learnings, we co-authored four stories, each unpacking design and programming strategies that can help transform seemingly mundane spaces—lobbies, hallways, and parking lots—into places that foster social connection. We find it is both easy and rewarding to transform any multi-unit building into a place where people know and support their neighbours.
More stories about Tomo Spaces and Our Urban Village:
Developer Mark Shieh sees shared living spaces as a way to bring fractured communities together. The Globe and Mail
What’s behind the Tomo name of a new cohousing project? Georgia Straight
Making connections. The Globe and Mail
Cohousing project in Vancouver. Daily Hive
Cohousing Lite enters the Vancouver housing lexicon. The Courier
Cohousing communities reveal the benefits of supportive, multigenerational neighbours—showing that apartment living doesn’t have to be lonely or isolating.