On Wednesday, June 28, at 5:30 p.m. at the Library, author Diane Margolis will read from her book “We Built a Village” followed by a question and answer session. The book describes the development of one of the first cohousing communities in the United States, offering a social understanding of its commons.Cohousing, a form of communal living that clusters around shared common space, began about a half century ago in Denmark. “We Built a Village” describes the process of planning and building an early cohousing community in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the way the people involved simultaneously built their homes and their social structure. As both a memoir and a sociological analysis that probes the differences between commons and markets, it is unique among books about cohousing. When this group of people began in the late 1990s to construct their cohousing community, they set in motion a counterpoint between the physical spaces and the social configurations that would guide their lives together, even up to creative responses to the recent pandemic.Diane Rothbard Margolis is a founding member of Cambridge Cohousing where she has lived for more than 20 years. She
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