Last weekend I went to visit La Grande Cense with a group of volunteers. This co-housing community near Brussels is now some last renovations before all individuals and families can start moving into their new homes. They are therefore organizing a summer camp where everyone is invited to help.
A group of 30 grown ups and 15 children will be soon living in 20 units in a fully renovated old farm with a big inner courtyard for social gatherings, a big and sunny terrace, shared kitchen & lounging facilities and large garden space.
Although the construction site already looks liveable it was not the actual space that impressed me most this weekend. I was more impressed by the group members.
You can feel that everyone at the Grande Cense group has gone through an intense learning process. Becoming clear about your own core values, defining a shared vision, establishing an effective decision making process and clear ground rules. All this costs a lot of time and effort and it is as essential for a co-housing project as finding a nice space to live and defining technical and ecological parameters.
What is more challenging than sharing your life with a group of people?
It takes a strong core group with shared values, a clear vision and the necessary organizational and people skills, to set up a co-housing project.
Our little volunteer group was using ecological paint to paint some of the walls in the common area. With all information and tips for a future co-housing project we gathered and some nice conversations, it only felt good to be able to contribute 2 days of work to this project.
Nature does not stop where land ends. We all have heard about reefs that are being threatened due to over fishing, water pollution and other factors that cause damage under sea level. But have you ever thought about doing something about it?
Professor Wolf Hilbertz could be described as ‘architect of the ocean’. Together with his colleagues from theGlobal Coral Reef Alliance (GCRA) have developed a way of recreating the reefa technique seems very simple – so simple that eventually a five year old would be able to dream it up: What do we do with all the corals and fish if their reef is being destroyed? Let’s build them a new home!
The actual execution of such a project requires however a firm technique, lots of manpower, and support of experts like Professor Hilbertz of the GCRA: A huge structure of iron bars is build on land and then transported to the reef location. Slowly and with lots of patience a group of scuba divers help to safely guide the big and fragile structure to its final location. After it has been placed they fix fractures of corals that are broken off a former reef on the iron bars of the structure.
Its not as easy as it sounds to actually make a reef ‘grow’ on such an artificial surrounding– but there is a solution: A technique called Electrolytic Mineral Accretion Technology (BiorockTM). This is a method that causes the crystallization of minerals on the outside of the iron structure by creating safe, low voltage electrical currents through the seawater. This technique speeds up the formation and growth of chemical limestone rock shell-bearing organisms and skeletons of corals. The reef starts grows rapidly.
Professor Wolf Hilbertz passed away in August 2007 but his dream still exists: The recreation of reefs which is a milestone in saving one of our biggest and for a big part still unexplored natural resources: the Ocean.
Here a case study from Pemuteran, Bali:
Images by Wolf Hilbertz; video by Rani Morrow-Wuigk.
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