IMAGINE — Exploring the brave new world of shared living

IMAGINE is a podcast exploring the brave new world of shared living. The final episode of the season explores the growing trend of “co-living spaces”, looks at the results of SPACE10’s Playful Research project One Shared House 2030, which sought to find out what people are (and aren’t) willing to share, and considers how to create shared-living spaces that appeal to the many people, not the few.

IMAGINE is a podcast that explores the brave new world of shared living, and whether the spaces we inhabit can be designed to improve our well being. This episode dives into the world of intentional communities and tries to answer this simple question. Is shared living better living? To do so, we go on a road trip deep in the heart of the Danish suburbs, to meet some people who have chosen to share much of their daily lives. They’re not cults. They’re not communes. They’re shared-living communities — and they could just well be the future of living.

IMAGINE is a podcast that explores the brave new world of shared living. In episode two, we dive deeper into the relationship between the spaces we inhabit and well-being, and ask if a better designed environment can make our lives better in turn. We meet a Norwegian evolutionary biologist and a Canadian anthropologist who are both investigating whether people who live in intentional communities lead happier lives. And we talk to Meik Wiking, founder of the Happiness Research Institute, to find out what his team has determined about the factors that affect happiness — and what this tells us about shared living.

IMAGINE is a SPACE10 podcast exploring the brave new world of shared living. It begins by asking how we can design the spaces we inhabit to improve our well-being. The story starts in Copenhagen, where SPACE10 is based, with Jan Gehl—the pioneering Danish urban planner who showed how we can transform our quality of life by changing our cities. Gehl’s influential writings include the observation that it is inherently human to want to be around other people, that being in the presence of other people is highly interesting, and we should build our cities accordingly — at the “human scale”. He has since worked with cities across the planet to improve their quality of urban life by orienting urban design towards people. And with the United Nations predicting that cities will swell by some 2.5 billion people by 2050, making them more crowded than ever, it’s imperative that tomorrow’s cities are developed and designed to be as liveable as possible — making Gehl’s observations more timely than ever.