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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 



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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 fluidity in 

connection among Quayside Village residents. Through analyzing exemplary decision-making 

processes, characteristic activities such as common meals or cleaning of shared spaces, regular 

meetings, and their solution of conflict, the philosophy set out at the founding of the communities 

is carefully dissected in comparison with the practice of those principles in everyday life. The idea 

of the good life is also described for each of the communities: for the Canadians, the comfort of 

connection afforded by proximity with others; and for the Japanese, a balanced set of oppositions, 

a togetherness that nurtures and does not swallow the individual. While not having explicitly 

defined what community is, Kingfisher has shown how communities are made and what they are 

about through the vignettes, stories and conversations retold. 

Chapter 4 then merges the two communities together by detailing the exchanges that the research 

team facilitated for representatives of each community to visit the other. Here, the researcher, as 

both a participant in the daily activities and the observer of community-making processes, took a 

step back to allow the voices of the protagonists—the residents in cohousing/collective housing—



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to take center stage, embodying the collaborative nature of the research as much as the 

communities’ own. The self-reflection from the residents’ travel diaries, with them acting as co-

researchers, as well as the discussion and implemented changes as a result of the two ten-day 

exchanges exemplifies the spirit of collaboration (and maybe friendly rivalry, where residents 

wonder “if we’re really doing things the best way,” 147), not just among the residents of 

Kankanmori or Quayside Village, between the researchers and the residents but also between the 

two communities. The concluding chapter brings the argument back to the call to understand well-

being, happiness and the good life in the bigger context of national and international development 

policies, asserting the need to focus on the social, the collective and the community and away from 

the personal, the individual. As the author recounted the remark by Ikuko Koyabe, a pioneer in the 

collective housing movement in Japan, “individual well-being depends on being part of a 

community and developing bonds with multiple and diverse others,” rather than approaches that 

prioritize one’s own needs mainstreamed by positive psychology and popular culture (185). 

Overall, Catherine Kingfisher has made a compelling case for the promotion, development and 

expansion of cohousing models as a viable alternative to other urban living arrangements, in the 

pursuit of happiness and the good life. The ethnography is well written, the language is accessible 

and generally the book can easily be read by an audience of various backgrounds, including 

policymakers; housing developers interested in cohousing; scholars in the study of well-being and 

happiness, housing and social transformation; as well as students of varying maturities in 

architecture, built environment and of course in the social sciences, especially anthropology. It can 

be an excellent reading for introductory courses in interdisciplinary studies. 

 

Phuong Nguyen is a doctoral researcher in the SNSF Project Aspiration for Change 4.0: The 

Making of Innovation in Viet Nam at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies 

(ISEK), Universität Zürich, Switzerland. With interests in urban ethnography, youth and 

technology, for her PhD project, Phuong is investigating innovations in the sharing economy of 

the PropTech industry (property technology), coworking and coliving spaces in urban Viet Nam. 

 



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© 2024 Phuong Nguyen 

 

 
i As the author noted, the term varies in the two contexts: while in Canada, “cohousing” is adopted, Japanese 

interlocutors prefer to call the model “collective housing”, which has connotations related to communism and 

socialism in the West. 

 


