KINGFISHER, CATHERINE PÉLISSIER. 2022. Collaborative Happiness: Building the Good Life in Urban Cohousing Communities. New York: Berghahn Books, 242 pp., ISBN 9781800732391

Keywords: community, the good life, cohousing, happiness, shared living

What are the ingredients of a good life? This is the question that acts as a red thread throughout the 242 pages of Catherine Kingfisher’s book, Collaborative Happiness: Building the Good Life in Urban Cohousing Communities. Situated in the study of well-being and happiness, this work provides a compelling argument for urban cohousing communities as an alternative, collaborative, and feasible option for creating a good life in the urban context. Drawing from extensive research spanning over multiple years of two urban cohousing/collective housing communities in Canada and Japan,[i] Kingfisher offers a rich and detailed ethnographic account of the residents in Quayside Village and Kankanmori to present the processes and happenings in the making of these communities, giving the readers a glimpse into their daily lives.

The book has set out its goal “not only to describe what urban cohousing looks like but also to feed the increasing awareness of cohousing as a viable option and to argue for placing it on the list of interventions that can improve both our daily lives and the condition of our planet” (5), by “complementing breadth with depth—by providing a full-length movie, as it were, to fill out the snapshots” (17–18). And quite literally, the four film shorts accompanying the text and aptly referred to throughout the chapters contribute very helpful visual aids to help with the imagination of the space and put a face to the (real) names of the residents. The book is based on the premise that, against the rise of hyperindividualism in many societies (including such traditionally collectivist ones as Japan’s), there exists a growing call to understand well-being and happiness as collectively built, and therefore cohousing as the solution to many social problems characterized by loneliness and fragmented social relations, in addition to overconsumption and environmental concerns.

The stories of the residents in Kankanmori and Quayside Village gradually unfold in a meandering course, with the life histories of representatives from each community completed by the meticulous description of the interactions in community-building activities. The book starts with an introduction, offering the theoretical background on the study of happiness, with Gordon Mathews and Carolina Izquierdo’s framework centering on three levels (macro, meso and micro) and four dimensions of well-being as the guiding lens. Chapter 1 sketches an overview of the two communities, with their principles, demographics, basic spatial summary and personal narratives laid out. Chapters 2 and 3 elaborate further on the processes, activities and principles that make cohousing/collective housing what it is, focusing on the dimension of the interpersonal in the collective meaning-making. A parallel conversation between philosophy and practice, as Kingfisher calls it, is conducted in each context, and this is where the ethnographic details shine through in presenting both the chartered rules and what happens on the ground. While in Kankanmori, community “is collaboratively produced in a deliberate, overtly planned way” (133), and “intimate public space was seen as a mechanism for building and maintaining community (126), the permeable boundaries between the public and the private allow for more