The Little Book of Lykke: The Danish Search for the World's Happiest People(6)

In Danish, the word for community is f?llesskab. F?llesskab can be split up into f?lles, meaning ‘common’ or ‘shared’, and skab, which can mean either ‘cabinet’ or ‘create’. Not only is community our common cabinet (our shared supplies), it is also something we create together. I think there is some beauty in that.

Like the Germans, we Danes love compound words. Maybe it is because of the cold climate, but Danish words like to spoon. R?stofproduktionsopg?relsesskemaudfyldningsvejledning is the word for a manual to fill out a questionnaire about the production of raw materials. It is also the reason why Scrabble in Denmark is considered an extreme sport and is the number-one cause of wrist injuries. There are seventy words in the official Danish dictionary by the Society for Danish Language and Literature that have the word f?llesskab in them.

We talk about…

Bof?llesskab:

A co-housing scheme

F?llesgrav:

A shared grave, e.g. where several people are buried together F?llesskabsf?lelse:

A sense of community

F?lles?konomi:

A shared economy, e.g. when couples have a joint bank account Sk?bnef?llesskab:

A shared destiny

F?llessk?n:

A shared gender. Whereas most languages divide nouns into masculine and feminine, Danish nouns are divided into no-gender and common-gender – they are the hermaphrodites of nouns, if you will.





BOF?LLESSKAB – HAPPINESS OF THE COMMONS


The houses form an open circle around the common yard. It is June, there is a crisp blue sky, and the garden is alive with the sounds of children playing. Children from different families are running in and out of the houses.

Unlike most kids these days, these boys and girls are growing up with an unusual combination of freedom and security. Some of them are playing kubb – a lawn game said to have originated in the Viking age, in which you throw sticks at other sticks. A dog is watching, as if the game were the greatest invention ever. Other kids are gathered around a campfire with a couple of grown-ups.

‘Hi, Mikkel, you bandit!’ one of the men calls out, and smiles at us. J?rgen is one of the residents here and knows my friend Mikkel well.

Mikkel grew up here. He lives in Copenhagen now but, last summer, we returned to his childhood home to pick up his dad to go on our annual sailing trip. They sail; I photograph, and insist on calling the pictures ‘sailfies’. Despite this, I am invited to join them again every year. We cannot park next to the house because the parking spots are on the fringe of this little community, so you walk the last forty metres on foot, across the common yard, to get to Mikkel’s parents’ house. That is no coincidence: the area is designed to encourage social interaction and impromptu conversation between residents.

Credit 8





The place is called F?lleshaven. Yes, it is another compound word. F?lles means ‘common’ and haven means ‘garden’. It is a bof?llesskab. F?llesskab means ‘community’ and bo means ‘to live’. A bof?llesskab is a co-housing scheme which originated in Denmark but rapidly spread to the rest of Scandinavia and onwards.

The initiators were families and individuals who were discontent with then current ways of living. One of them was Bodil Graa, who wrote an opinion piece called ‘Children Should Have One Hundred Parents’ in one of the major papers in Denmark and asked for like-minded people to get in touch with her. Many did and, five years later, in 1972, the construction of the bof?llesskab S?tterdammen was finished. It consisted of twenty-seven independent houses and a large common house and is situated near Hiller?d, north of Copenhagen. It still exists today, and seventy people live there. They have a waiting list of those who would like to buy vacant homes. Today, around fifty thousand people live in co-housing in Denmark and it is still growing in popularity.

One of the hundreds of Danish bof?llesskaber is F?lleshaven, where my friend Mikkel grew up. It is home to sixteen families, among them twenty children. The bof?llesskab is designed for privacy as well as community. It means that each family has a private home with all the traditional amenities, including its own private kitchen. Yet the private homes are clustered around a shared space – a garden and a large communal kitchen and dining area. The families live separately, yet together.

If they feel like it, from Monday to Thursday the families eat together. Usually, there are between thirty and forty people at these dinners; a meal for an adult costs around 20 kroner (approximately ￡2.25) and those for kids are half price. To give you an idea of how little this is, I can tell you that a café latte in Copenhagen will set you back 40 kroner.

But it is not the price of the communal meals that is appealing to most people here. Especially for the families with young children, it is the fact that, four nights a week, there is no logistical juggling act of grocery shopping and preparing dinner. Instead, they help the kids with their homework, play kubb or teach them how to build a good campfire. One week every six months or so, they form part of the crew who prepares the dinner, and the older kids help out and learn how to cook. The food shift usually takes three hours, from preparing the food until the dishes are finished – obviously, with a break to eat dinner and a cup of coffee afterwards. But on most nights, residents at F?lleshaven can relax and wait for the bell that tells them dinner is ready.

Besides the dining area and the campfire, F?lleshaven also has a shared vegetable garden, a playground and playing field, an art studio, a workshop and spare guestrooms if people have too many guests to put up in their own homes. The set-up also means that the children always have someone to play with. Not once have the families had a need to hire a babysitter. If the parents want to go to the cinema or see a play, they just send their kids to their friends across the yard.