Course Syllabus

Building Community: Experiments in Communal Living in Denmark

Building Community: Experiments in Communal Living in Denmark

 

Semester & Location:	Spring 2026 - DIS Copenhagen
Type & Credits:	Elective Course - 3 credits
Major Disciplines:	Sociology; Urban Studies; History;
Related Disciplines	Philosophy; Urban Design
Faculty Members:	Stephen Lloyd-Moffett
Time & Place:	Tuesday, Friday 13:15 14:35 in F24-303 Frederiksberggade 24 (access also from V23)

Course Description

Humans have experimented with different ways of living together since tribes first formed many generations ago.  Denmark has been central to those experimentations in the modern era as the fountainhead of the cohousing, eco-village, and collective house movements. With the backdrop of these active Danish experiments in communal living in mind, this course asks you to consider the questions of community: how do/should we humans share space and resources together?  Is there an alternative to the single-family living norms that dominate the modern developed world?  What lessons can experiments in communal living offer for our wider society, even when they fail?   

This course will center on learning by doing: over the course of the quarter, your primary task will be to design and plan for a community, planned for outside of Denmark but based upon the best practices of what we have learned from the Danish collaborative living environment.   As we systematically develop the elements that make for a successful alternative community, our class unfolds into three parts:  Part I is the "why" of community--where we look at the motivations historically and in the present to found a community.  Part II is the "how" of community, where we get into all challenges and decisions needed to found a community; local experts will be joining many of these classes.  Finally, Part III is the "here" of community where we focus on all the different forms of alternative living in Denmark, including collectives, cohousing, ecovillages, senior cohousing, urban co-living, and communities for the developmentally disabled.  We will have many experts and practitioners join our classes along our journey and we will have visits to ecovillages and cohousing communities.  We will ultimately use these experiences to answer the question, "Why has it worked so well here, in Denmark?"   

 Learning Objectives

• Interrogate and analyze the different forms of human cohabitation across time, with particular attention to the contributions of Denmark.
• Connect the theoretical considerations and intellectual history to real-world examples of communal living “in the field” of Denmark.
• Employ the study of collaborative housing in Denmark as a lens to understand Danish culture and society.
• Develop senses of belonging among classmates as examples of the ways in which collaborative forms of housing are predicated on the formation of micro-societies.
• Develop research skills and academic writing proficiency through research of historical and contemporary communities.

 

Faculty

 Stephen Lloyd-Moffett has been a professor of Religious Studies in Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, where he is also the co-founder of an intentional community, gathering space, and farm called The Lavra.  For the last decade, he has been on the board of the International Communal Studies Association and has presented frequently at conferences dedicated to the academic study of community.  He is currently a guest researcher at the Department of Built Environment (BUILD) at Aalborg University, Copenhagen.  He received his PhD in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2005, MA from UCSB in 2002, MTh in Theology from St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in 2002, and BA in Economics and Film Studies from Claremont McKenna College in 1994.

 

Assignments

Design your Community Project (40%)

This course centers on learning by doing. Over the quarter, your primary task will be to design and plan a collaborative living community located outside of Denmark, grounded in the best practices we study from Danish collaborative living environments. You will work in groups to develop a coherent vision, make a large set of real-world planning decisions, and ultimately present a compelling community proposal.

Part I: The “Why” of community → Your Vision Statement

The first part of the course focuses on the purpose and values behind communal living. Your group will develop and submit a negotiated Vision Document that defines the core intent of your community and will guide every later decision.

Your Vision Document (due the end of week 9) should represent shared agreement (not just a collection of individual opinions) and clearly state what your community is trying to offer and why it matters.

Part II: Making the decisions → Three design areas

Forming a community requires hundreds of choices. In Part II, we’ll organize those choices into three focus areas. These sessions are designed to prepare you to make the kinds of decisions you’ll need to plan your own community.

1) Architectural Design Where will your community be located? What will it look like? How will the built environment support daily life, privacy, and togetherness?

2) Social Design: How will you organize relationships and shared life? How will decisions be made? What agreements, norms, and practices will help the community thrive?

3) Structure & Formation of Community How will you get this community off the ground?  What legal/organizational structure might it need? How will membership, governance, finances, and development unfold over time?  How will it be marketed.

Part III: Learning from Danish communities → Apply and adapt

In Part III, we focus on learning directly from Danish communities. You will analyze what you admire, what you would adopt, and what you would do differently—then incorporate those insights into your own plan. The goal is not to copy any single community in Denmark, but to translate lessons thoughtfully into a new context outside Denmark.

During Week 19, you will present your community to the world (or at least our class) through: 

1. An in-class pitch: a presentation where you introduce your community and make the case for why others should join it. A community expert and I will evaluate your pitch and will ask you pointed questions to test the clarity, feasibility, and integrity of your proposal.

2. A final written report (due the same day): a complete community plan that outlines the major components and decisions behind your design.

More detailed requirements, evaluation criteria, and support materials will be provided in class as we move through each project phase.

My Notebook on Communal Living (30%)

Over the course of this class, you will keep a single, ongoing notebook that I provide called My notebook on communal living. Think of it as your personal “container” for everything you encounter in the course—and for how your own thinking changes as you go.

This notebook is not meant to be a polished project, a piece of art, or a master class in organization. It’s meant to be useful: one place where you collect ideas, questions, observations, and reflections so you can return to them later. Your notebook should show both what you learned and how you’re processing it.

What goes in the notebook

Add notes and reflections from:

• Class sessions (both lectures and guest speakers)

• Podcasts and reading assignments

• Site visits (observations, details, conversations, impressions)

• Your own ideas along the way (questions, connections, disagreements, “aha” moments, sketches of concepts, etc.)

• A directed FAQ about communal living that will conclude your notebook--the questions for the FAQ will be given a week before it is due and this section will function as an end-of-term wrap up.

You can write in whatever style works for you: bullets, paragraphs, messy brain-dumps, diagrams, mind maps, partial sentences—anything is fine as long as it helps you think and remember.

The only strict expectation is that every entry is clearly titled and labeled, so it’s obvious what it’s from and what it’s about.

Examples of good titles:

• Class on February 1 —  Topic (e.g., Architecture in Community)

• Podcast — Topic (e.g., Ecovillages)

• Reading Notes — [Author/Title]

• Site Visit — [Location] — Observations

• Notes on Guest Speaker X from Y Organization

• Ideas about Topic (e.g., Governance)

• Questions I’m Carrying This Week

If you want, you can also add a date to every entry—but the key requirement is that the topic/source is unmistakable at a glance.

Support + check-in

I’ll give prompts and hints along the way about what I’m hoping to see (for example: types of questions to ask, details to capture on visits, or connections to look for between topics).

We will also do a check-in about one-third of the way through the course to make sure you’re on track and using the notebook in a way that will actually support your learning. This is a chance to catch issues early—not a “gotcha.”

What I’m looking for overall

By the end, your notebook should feel like:

• a chronicle of what you were exposed to, and

• a record of your own thinking in motion—what you’re noticing, questioning, connecting, and reconsidering.

In other words: one messy, honest, useful place where your learning lives.

International Communities Fair (15%)

Beginning in the 1960s, there was a revolution in collaborative living in many parts of the developed world but some of the most interesting were here in Europe.  This project is intended to map some of the most interesting experiments in alternative living in Europe and inspire your classmates to visit them!  Together, we will pick a community for you to focus on and then you will write up a small ethnographic report with the following topics:

1. The History of the Community
2. Biographical Notes on the Founders
3. The form or focus of the community (i.e., what brings them together, including perhaps spirituality, environmental concerns, socio-economic concerns, etc…)
4. The systems they have in place: how do they make decisions? Are they income sharing?  What are their environmental goals?
5. The role of artistic expression, design, and shared ritual within the community.
6. An analysis of the unique challenges the community faces.
7. Lasting influence of the community (if applicable)

Then you will create a poster for our "International Communities Fair" when we will invite all of DIS to wander through the student center and find out about cool places they might want to consider visiting this summer after their time at DIS.  In lieu of class, we will have an open communities fair where you represent “your” community to other members of our broader DIS community.

Participation (15%)

The classroom and site visits are our living laboratories where learning occurs and are predicated on each of you being present and prepared.  My hope is that all of you will participate through being curious, attentive, and dedicated to the class.  Do the preparation work for classes. Ask questions.  Engage with the generous people who invite us for site visits. 

Here are some guidelines on participation:

Be considerate of your peers: The classroom is the laboratory for humanities and social sciences courses.  Your participation is critical to the success of this learning environment.  While there will be times when straight lecturing is inevitable, my style is customarily very interactive lecturing in this class.  You will be called on to contribute to the class dialogue, though I respect that each person has different natural dispositions in this regard.  My goal is to have discussions based on honesty, enthusiasm, kindness, critical thought, and respect for different worldviews, experiences, and beliefs. 

A few reminders on classroom civility:

1. All cell phones must be turned off during class. NO TEXT MESSAGING DURING CLASS!  You will be considered absent on the day if I see you text message.  If I see you text twice in a quarter, you will receive an “F” on the next exam. (But if there is a legitimate reason to have your phone out in class, just tell me before the class!)
2. Food and beverages are okay, as long as you do not disturb class and pick up after yourselves (i.e. take trash with you, clean up messes, etc.)
3. No laptops in class.  There are some days when I will ask you to bring your laptops to class, but other than these explicit exceptions, you will take notes in your "My Notebook on Community Living" that I provide, instead of on laptops.  This policy is for three reasons: first, while students think they learn better when they take notes on computer, every study has been shown to be the opposite.  Students learn better when you write out notes by hand.  If you want to type the notes afterward as a way to study, it is fine but your learning will improve by hand writing notes.  Additionally, the distractions provided by the web are just too tempting for people and this inevitably distracts other students, even if you can multitask well.   Third, when we have discussion, the quality of the discussion is predicated on everyone being fully present.  If some people are hiding behind screens, it stifles good conversations.  So, no computers in class.  Tablets in which you hand-write the notes are ok.  However, do not abuse this electronic access and spend time browsing instead of taking notes.  As with phones, if I detect browsing going on, then I’ll simply mark you as absent for the whole day.  

 Class Preparation: Readings and other ways of prep. The literature on alternative living, both in global contexts and in Denmark in particular, is vast.  Instead of a single book, this class will employ lots of different modalities to learn: traditional articles and book chapters but also podcasts, youtube videos, and articles in the popular press.  These will all be linked from our home page.  You will take notes and jot down your thoughts in your "My Notebook on Communal Living"

 

Class-Specific Policies

Academic Integrity

Any university is predicated on students learning information and expanding their worldview.  For this to process to work, all students must uphold the highest standards of academic integrity.  Any deviance from this goal hurts not only your own learning but undermines the entire system.  I encourage you to discuss the class with your fellow classmates as much as possible and make full use of the web and AI as research tools, however, their work should not take the place of your thinking.  It has to be your thinking.   I'd rather have a half-formed idea from you than a perfectly crafted paragraph from Chat GPT.  

All forms of academic dishonesty, especially plagiarism and outsourcing your thinking to AI, will not be tolerated and will lead to an F for the course.   If the rules are unclear or you are unsure of how they apply, ask me beforehand. Turning in work is presumed to be a claim of authorship and your own thinking, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

Late Work Policy

Generally, I would rather have you turn in work late than not turn it in at all, but we will take a 5% reduction for each day it is late.  However, if you know you will be late for a legitimate reason, please contact me well before the due date and we can make arrangements commensurate with your specific situation.  The critical element is communicating with me in a timely manner. YES, I (and most professors) are far more understanding if you tell us beforehand rather than wait until afterwards.  Give us a heads up and we will likely be understanding; beg for special treatment afterwards and we will likely be skeptical.  So LET ME KNOW BEFOREHAND IF YOU THINK YOU WILL BE LATE WITH AN ASSIGNMENT.

ASSIGNMENT SUMMARY:
Our New Community                      40%

International Communities Fair      15%

My Notebook on Communal Living    30%

Participation                                          15%

 

GRADING SCALE

The following Grading Scale is utilized for student evaluation. Pass/Fail is not an option for DIS coursework.

 

Pluses and minuses are awarded as follows on a 100% scale:

 

Excellent	Good	Satisfactory/Poor	Failing
97-100%:  A+ 93-96%:    A 90-92%:    A-	87-89%: B+ 83-86%: B 80-82%: B-	77-79%: C+ 70-76%: C 60-69%: D	Less than 60%: F

 DIS Class Policies 

ATTENDANCE/ENGAGEMENT IN THE ACADEMIC PROGRAM

Attendance in all classes, including the Field Classes, is mandatory. Students must inform their instructors prior to any unanticipated absence and take the initiative to make up missed work in a timely fashion. Instructors must make reasonable efforts to enable students to make up work which must be accomplished under the instructor’s supervision (e.g., examinations, laboratories).

 

CLASSROOM CLIMATE

The classroom environment is founded on mutual respect, community, and an aim toward equity. These Community Values support the creation of a collaborative and vibrant community. Our community is the foundation of our learning, critical inquiry, and discovery. Each member of this course has a responsibility to uphold the following values when engaging with one another.

• Well-Being: We commit to the health, safety and well-being of ourselves, all members of our learning community, andthe hosts we will visit.
• Interconnectedness: We understand our actions and attitudes have an impact locally and globally. We always seek to positively affect the planet and the people around us near and far.
• Respect: We honor the inherent dignity of all peoplewith an abiding commitment to freedom of expression, scholarly discourse and the advancement of knowledge. We have the right to be treated, and the responsibility to treat others, with fairness and equity.
• Inclusion: We ensure inclusive environments that welcome, value, affirm and embrace all peoplewithin our learning community and among the site visits we visit.
• Integrity: We are honest and ethical in all of our interactions, including our academic work. We hold ourselves accountable for our actions.
• Excellence: We model the highest academic standards of preparation, inquiry and knowledge and consistently seek to understand complex issues and express informed opinions with courage and conviction.

 

 

LEARNING ACCOMMODATIONS

This classroom provides academic accommodations for students with diagnosed learning disabilities, in accordance with ADA guidelines. Students who will need accommodations in a class, should contact DIS or me to discuss their individual needs. Any accommodation must be discussed in a timely manner prior to implementation.  

A letter from students’ home institutions verifying the accommodations received on their home campuses (dated within the last three years) is required before any accommodation is provided for this class.

STUDENT CONDUCT CODE

The foundation of a university is truth and knowledge, each of which relies in a fundamental manner upon academic integrity and is diminished significantly by academic misconduct. Academic integrity is conceptualized as doing and taking credit for one’s own work. A pervasive attitude promoting academic integrity enhances the sense of community and adds value to the educational process. All within the learning community are affected by the cooperative commitment to academic integrity.

 

Academic Regulations 

Please make sure to read the Academic Regulations on the DIS website. There you will find regulations on:

• Course Enrollment and Grading
• Academic Expectations and Honor Code

 

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