Abstract

Although recently it is receiving increasing public attention, cohousing is still a fuzzy contours phenomenon, often analyzed in an hagiographic way. Therefore the paper proposes a critical reflection which, through taxonomic analysis and comparison with gated communities, brings cohousing within the «family» to which it belongs: residential private community, with which cohousing shares all the well-know problems. The paper is divided into two sections. In the first one, (§ 1) the author provides a descriptive overview of cohousing; in the second one (§ 2 and 3), after a taxonomical classification proposal, the author highlights main topical and critical cohousing characters.