Community has been the beating heart of the shared living and coliving movements since the very beginning. Not only do communities help establish the safety, support, and trust needed for people to flourish, but they are coming to define the most competitive and resilient shared living business models today.

As more operators, developers, and investors recognize this potential and update traditional profit-driven models with human-and-experience-centered models, we felt it was important to revisit this big question: What is the recipe to build and sustain thriving communities?

Spoiler alert: it's not easy!

Community building is layered, dynamic, and messy. But despite this, it represents the greatest opportunity to unlock coliving's social and economic potential.

Before we dig into how to streamline this process, let's lay some foundations: what do we even mean by community? And what is a community framework?

As Mr. Perdrix points out, people just living together inside a building is a very narrow definition of community. We need to recognize that community is a feeling. It's a shared emotional connection or sense of belonging within a group.

In turn, a community framework is any set of processes, systems, and conditions that leads to identification or emotional affiliation between people in a group. It is a way for people to understand, "I actually care about you," or "we belong together," or "I am a part of this group." For Gui, "Community shows up in the way that people commit and engage towards each other."

Community is a feeling. And operators can master the right processes to enable its creation.

— Gui Perdrix
Art of Co

We interrogated some key questions: How can we design frameworks to cultivate authentic communities? How do we balance economic pressures and inclusivity with community curation? How do different community frameworks support different business models, and what are their trade-offs or risks?

Today, we are excited to share x6 BIG insights and practices to build magnetic, thriving communities.

1. First, what can shared living learn from Burning Man? 🌞

Burning Man is one of the most renowned, successful community-centered events in the world. Each year, nearly 80,000 people gather in Black Rock Desert to build a fully functional city from scratch. This is an unparalleled experience of community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance.

The festival hosts over three hundred large-scale art installations and over five hundred 'art cars' (fully customized vehicles cruising the desert, including full-sized pirate ships and giant swans). One of the core principles is 'Decommodification.' This means nothing is for sale, everything is free. When anyone gives you anything, it’s done so unconditionally. Nothing is expected in return; it's a gift. Transaction, bartering, and money are forbidden for anything but ice, coffee, and gasoline for the art cars.

When people enter the gates to the festival, they are often greeted with "welcome home." So, how is it that this place in the desert, which is quite harsh, is considered home to so many people? "Well, it's called home because you find your communities there. You'll find your brother, your sister, your tribe," Isabelle describes.

You may already feel the gravity of this place, but what is it that actually brings this world-wide community back together year after year? What about this extraordinary experience is able to uphold communal bonds far beyond the event – even as ‘burners’ return to their desk jobs or normal lives for the rest of the year?

To start, Isabelle points out, "we are united by 10 principles, and they are very strong. It's not the Bible. It's more like a constitution. It defines our ethos and our culture."

A few principles include Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Radical Self-expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, and Participation. (You can read about all ten here.) They not only help define rules and shape mindsets between participants, but they establish immediate trust. "If someone comes to you and says, 'I am a burner,' you know you can interact with them in so many more ways. It's difficult to define. It's more like a family member."

Our idea is not curate people that come to Burning Man. Our idea is to change the world. We take whoever we have and try to make them burners, which is very different.

— Isabelle Mas
Burning Man France Contact

While all coliving spaces rely on house rules, many do not go as far to define community principles. This may be one of the greatest latent potentials within the coliving market today. Strong principles can clearly help unite people behind a common vision and mindset. And promoting those principles effectively can help curate potential members who self-identify and align with them.

It's worth pointing out some significant differences between Burning Man (as well as Experience House) and standard coliving communities. For one, the desert is abrasive. The shared struggle, and the need to help one another through it, lends a unique opportunity to build trust, cooperation, and supportive relationships. Alternatively, Experience House was located in the Guatemalan jungle. In remote locations like this, residents become each other's stimulus. More time is spent focused within the community compared to coliving projects in cities, which are saturated in urban activity and distractions. Cities pull people out of the space more often, which generally means less time with each other.

Secondly, people naturally bring a very different mindset and relationship to more open-ended experiences like housing than they do to specific engagements or events. Vacation is an easy example: the finite amount of time away creates pressure to get the most out of that experience. In this respect, Burning Man and Experience House invite very different mindsets and desires compared to normal coliving life. But to what degree could coliving spaces achieve a similar mentality of presence? Or turn activities in the city into opportunities for shared experiences between members?

2— Each stage of the community experience is vital. 🌱 🌿 🌳 🍁 🍂

Building communities is a layered process. Today, most operators and facilitators only focus on one or two stages to nurture their communities. Maybe this is curating members, hosting a few events in the space, or organizing house trivia nights. But there are many more stages. Each is equally as important.

Gui breaks this process down into x7 key stages of experience. We've outlined them as direct calls to action and questions to reflect on your own project:

1. Discovery: how do you present your brand? Many operators still approach this from a profit-driven or marketing perspective without fully considering how it can influence or undermine their ability to build a strong community. Better questions include: are you attracting the right people? Do you communicate on your values or principles? How can you communicate your principles in a stronger, distinct way?

2. Curation: do you have the right process to understand how people will assimilate into the community? Do you have a vetting processing in place to actually talk to people before they enter? Are you qualifying new members based on your values? If you truly prioritize community, you don't want people to come out of pure convenience or because it looks cool. You want to attract members who actually want to participate and contribute within the community and the shared experiment of coliving. *

3. Onboarding: what are you doing to onboard members into your community? Most operators miss this step entirely! 🚨 This process is crucial to make new members aware of your values, introduce them to the other residents, and explain the rituals in the space.

4. Adoption: after onboarding, it is critical to help new members adapt and assimilate into the community as quickly as possible – another stage that is largely missed across the industry! This can be in the form of ongoing education, mentorship between old and new members, or routine rituals within the space. (More on this later!)

5. Communal Life: this is the stage where most people are in their coliving experience. It's the day-to-day rhythm and motion of the space, where new experiences, projects, and co-creation take place along with regular gatherings.

6. Offboarding: as an operator, when and how do you collect feedback and learnings from your members? Many operators say they are always open to feedback, but do your members understand this? Let alone, do they feel trust to be heard through your channels? Offboarding provides the most important moment to learn and get feedback from members – when they decide to move on. What is actually driving that decision? Why not schedule a brief offboarding call to make a meaningful impression and collect constructive feedback before they go? This is your last straightforward opportunity to gain insight into your space.

7. Afterlife: how can communities continue to thrive even after leaving the shared environment? This is even more critical for events like Burning Man and Experience House, but for regular coliving residents, who may live more transitory lives, what are the best ways to stay connected and preserve feelings of community and belonging? For example, WhatsApp groups and newsletters remain go-to solutions. But more broadly, how are you supporting your communities to transition and thrive in digital spaces together?

* Isabelle raised a key point about the resilience of a community's culture. Sociological and ethnological studies have shown that when groups absorb more than 30% of new members into the community, they will disrupt the current structure, cultural model, or communal traditions. If not treated quickly and carefully, such a disruption could replace or collapse the existing culture.

This is extra important for spaces that have already built thriving communities and cultures based upon their principles. Absorbing lots of new members at once can thus pose a risk, highlighting the need to onboard and assimilate people into the existing culture as quickly as possible.

3— Design is crucial. But people are EVERYTHING. 🌈

As an architecture design studio, we’ve always harbored some bias about design’s role in shared living space. But after a couple of members from our team lived in coliving spaces ourselves, our perspectives shifted.

The essential experience of coliving is defined by the people. We are social creatures, and even when in the coliving space or a private alone, these new relationships, dialogues, collaborations, and social possibilities hold far more presence in the mind than the beauty or comfort of the space.

Design and environment still play vital roles. In the day-to-day, design should enable people to do the things they need to do and remove barriers or frictions between those activities. When design is doing its job, residents are empowered to live, connect, and socialize more fully, more comfortably, and more flexibly – without distraction or issue.

But getting the right people is most important. Design plays a vital role to make the right first impression and help curate the community. Different designs help attract and filter different people. After all, when people are deciding where to live, they mostly go by the photos and the feeling each option gives them.

4— One step closer to a magic formula... 🧪

Ultimately, no matter how good the design or the user experience, there will be variability and unexpected challenges. Irregular internet outages, residents having different definitions of “clean,” personality collisions, or just the way people communicate. Community managers and facilitators can address these frictions and help elevate the experience as a whole. But they need to be adaptive and sensitive to the changing tides – especially as members come and go.

Each house has its own personality. Each is almost like its own Netflix series in its own season.

— Ricardo Neves
Oka Coliving

Let's break down three intricate layers to nurture a community's potential and bring out the best of its members: 1) Facilitating to alleviate social frictions. 2) Cultivating alignment between members to build safety and trust. 3) Establishing rituals to foster authentic connections.

As Gui puts it, "the way I think about the feeling of community is alignment, minus difference." In this respect, the job of a community facilitator is to reduce social frictions and cultivate alignment between residents. Gui continues, “the more community builders can help overcome those differences, the more residents can focus on their commonalities, their shared vision, and their common projects.”

Gui was generous to share some magnificent insights and best practices from his upcoming book, Art of Co. Let's start by first looking at how to reduce frictions and tensions within a community:

1. Overcome the tragedy of the commons. When spaces and resources are shared, people feel less responsibility and ownership over them. This leads to some extra wear-and-tear, dirty dishes, messy fridges, crumb trails, etc. It's crucial to align and instill awareness and responsibility in all residents to avoid this trap. This takes dedication, patience, and practice, especially when members need to change their own habits to accommodate others.

2. Make the rules known to everyone. This includes both standard rules like sleeping hours and clean-up, but also soft rules like how to communicate with one another and how to deal with conflict. Many people avoid conflict and aren't prepared on how to start a difficult conversation. Giving members some constructive guidelines and solutions on how to do so can empower them to address conflict, rather than bottle up resentments.

3. Express fears. Hold routine space for people to share their feelings. This can be difficult, but the more open and vulnerable residents can be with each other, the deeper the trust and resilience they can build upon. (We outline a great example framework from Experience House further below.)

4. Prepare for the worst. Coliving is a reflection of society. It is not immune to issues like heavy drug abuse, sexual assault, depression, and suicide. Thus, it is critical to be prepared and know how to handle such events to preserve the safety, health, and wellness of members. Have a strategy and solution to build upon before you have to react and respond to hard events. As Ricardo presented with Oka Coliving, in some situations this can involve consulting with residents' families and doctors to understand and build the right approach.

Once you are able to overcome these tensions and differences, you can focus on cultivating alignment between people. Gui goes on to outline some key principles to follow at this stage:

1. Speed up the integration process. Onboard and assimilate residents through a well-defined process to instill community values, meet your community members, and involve them in the shared experience.

2. Invest into a common cause. It's important for residents to commit, contribute, and engage within the space and community. This can be done in many ways, but it's key to generate ownership.

3. Express love and desires. (This builds upon the example ritual framework detailed below.)

4. Reach for the best. Have residents express how they feel towards this community and opportunities they see to get involved. This helps everyone establish and co-create the vision and, most importantly – feel belonging to it.

Experience House proposed a particularly inspiring framework, which not only enabled residents to move through challenges – but also opened space to deepen appreciation of one another and put new plans into motion as a community.

Each Sunday evening, all residents came together. One person would take notes of everything for anyone unable to attend. The basic agenda moved through gratitudes, do-overs, and grievances, before diving into planning.

• Gratitudes: residents shared moments they were grateful for within the community. Maybe someone helped you make a smoothie while you were running late for a meeting, and this totally rocked your day. Maybe someone taught you something you wouldn't have otherwise learned. Take a moment to appreciate them and share that feeling publically.

• Do-overs: each member would reflect and recognize something they did that might not have been cool – and commit to changing that behavior. For example, leaving a bunch of dirty dishes or wet towels behind or saying something insensitive to another housemate.

• Grievances: this was a moment to address and defuse tensions between residents. This was done in a non-violent communication format. The format starts with an observation (I noticed that...), moves to a feeling (I felt...), then a need (I need...), and ends on an ask or request. For example: I noticed that my personal food is being eaten. I feel frustrated by this, and I need to know that I can buy my own food, and it'll be there later when I'm hungry. Can we please agree to not eat each other's personal food?

This weekly ritual helped the group stay connected, engaged, and conscientious. This specific framework arose and evolved from within the community, rather than as something suggested or imposed from the top-down. It might be difficult to instigate such an elaborate or intimate ritual from the outside. But who knows, maybe sharing these ideas with the right community members could inspire and empower them. Otherwise, as Ricardo points out, "free food never fails to bring the people together! It's always a great place to start the conversation."

5— CO-CREATION is the fast-track to generate ownership. 🛠

Ownership is becoming understood as one of the single most important and empowering feelings coliving spaces can create for their residents. The more ownership people feel within an experience, space, or group, the more belonging they feel. The more belonging, the more tight-knit, resilient, and long-lasting the community. The stronger the community, the more fulfilled, happy, and healthy its individuals.

As Gui describes, "if people don't have ownership, they're not going to identify themselves with the community and what's happening." He goes on to outline three basic models coliving spaces fall into:

1. Do It Yourself: coliving operators give residents the keys and don’t interact any further. It’s a totally hands-off relationship.

2. Top-down Management: this is the dominant approach today. Operators decide what is happening to the residents. For example, Tuesday could be cocktails night while Sunday is board games night. This is OK, but it doesn't give residents ownership. Their participation initially rests on deciding 'to go or not to go', which is a very different feeling than conceiving and organizing the event themselves.

3. Bottom-up Facilitation: listen to the residents, ask them what they want, and support them to create that within the community or within the space. Maybe this involves a monthly budget to empower residents to participate in experiences altogether.

Operators need to shift from top-down to bottom-up facilitation if they truly wish to build communities – let alone compete in this next era of coliving.

Sam's project, Experience House (a pop-up coliving experience in Guatemala), uses an integrated bottom-up approach. All residents are encouraged to self-publish and host workshops and events to share knowledge, expertise, and talents within the group.

A shared Google Calendar and dedicated WhatsApp channel provided the basic framework to organize everything – from one-on-one sessions to master classes. "We basically said, here are the spaces. Here is the calendar. Fill it with whatever you'd like!"

“What’s really amazing about this format is that – if we, as organizers, had tried to program all this stuff, first of all, the ideas that we would have come up with just wouldn't be as interesting or amazing. And the amount of energy and work that went into all the events is something that we wouldn't have been able to have the bandwidth for.” In short, the right systems can decentralize this work and empower residents to co-create meaningful experiences.

Regarding Burning Man, Isabell points out participants literally build this city and all its artworks. “With coliving, you probably didn't build the house. But if you did build the house, the feeling of belonging would be much stronger. Of course, not everybody can build a house, but you know what I mean. You can decorate it, or organize it, and it makes it your own. And that’s a really strong feeling of ownership.”

What makes us a community is that we build together. And we specifically build art.

— Isabelle Mas
Burning Man France Contact

Some art installations require hundreds of volunteers and months to construct. This takes a lot of skills. You might find yourself as a carpenter for the first time in your life. You become friends with all the other builders. And when it is finished, admired, and shared by the festival, you feel very proud – especially if you are not a builder in your normal day-to-day life. This co-construction and satisfying ownership is at the heart of the burner community.

Ricardo's project, Oka Coliving, follows the facilitation approach beautifully. He found that opening relationships with 'house leaders' is an effective way to build and streamline exchange with residents and collaborate projects with them.

All such projects are sourced directly from inside the community, and they can happen both within the community but also in the broader society. Projects have included everything from toxic masculinity workshops, to a mini reality TV show of the houses, to a program of residents cooking weekly meals for the local homeless population. Oka supplies the food and organizes these weekly deliveries for this.

When it comes to fostering belonging, Ricardo highlights that tangible things are less impactful than intangible experiences and feelings. “We often see that members who furnish their room or paint their room do feel a lot more ownership. But usually, the intangible experiences are more profound for them to feel belonging in our community.”

6— Flexible rental models can undermine community potential. 🕊

Short-term rental contracts have become a staple of the coliving industry. And for plenty of good reasons. Especially when landing in a new city, how can people resist an all-inclusive and flexible rental option – not to mention the bonus opportunities to meet like-minded people?

These models address the market demand for pre-packaged, accessible spaces. But without great care, this convenience and flexibility can undermine the potential and quality of the community. As contracts give residents greater freedom, many of them don't stay long before finding their own place. This section is about confronting and overcoming misalignment between your community vision and business constraints.

Let's start with a quick thought experiment: if everyone you lived within a shared space shared they only expected to stay six months, how would that change your relationship to the space and your willingness to build relationships? Even on the six-month timescale, how much would this create an understanding that the space is temporary and community is transitory? Would you feel as inclined to invest in building relationships that could likely drift apart?

Resolving this tension between the need to rent rooms and the need to curate members who will easily assimilate in the community is one of the shared living’s greatest challenges.

All of this is not to say community is impossible, just that it takes greater care in these flexible models. Six-month turnover is the norm in LifeX's Berlin Townhouse (where one of our Cutwork’s team members presently lives). Ricardo notes that most members in Oka Coliving stay at least six months. Other operators who have fully prioritized community have abandoned the flexible model altogether, asking members to commit to a full year to fully integrate into the group.

But for flexible models averaging six-month stay, filling vacancies can become a game of whack-a-mole. These economic pressures – a direct result of the short-term, short-notice, flexible model – favor inclusivity to anyone on the rental market. This opens the door to more individuals who need a fast, all-inclusive room, but otherwise have no interest in participating in the experiment of coliving or contributing within the community.

The first big question: how can operators curate members effectively, at scale, to help ensure like-mindedness and willingness to participate within the community? As discussed before, principles and design can play significant roles here to curate people before they apply. But not only can the 'right principles' filter incompatible people. They can actually generate greater demand! Burning Man is an exceptional example. The principles carry so much gravity and such a big, radical vision, it's rather difficult not to be curious or desire to participate within this community. What Burning Man gets right is in how effectively it promotes these principles and vision above all else. It's simply not about having this extraordinary experience. It's about identifying and belonging to that tribe.

The second big question: how can spaces retain members longer? The longer people stay, the more potential members have to build meaningful relationships and cultivate tight-knit communities. Longer stays mean more resilient, stable communities. And this becomes a positive feedback loop: the stronger the community, the longer people are willing to stay! Not to mention, this means stabler revenues, less time and cost juggling turnover, and ultimately, greater profits for the business model as a whole.

Are you building spaces for communities to come together and thrive? Thinking to open or expand your shared living project?

We work with pioneering companies who are reimagining today’s habitats — and how spaces can be shared to establish more authentic, resilient, and sustainable communities.

If you share this vision, we’d love to connect and build them together.

Connect with us here:

➞ hello@cutworkstudio.com