How to Build a Community in a New City (The Coliving Way)

Building community as a digital nomad doesn't happen at networking events. It happens in kitchens. Community is built through repeated proximity, shared context, and low-stakes time together. Research consistently shows loneliness is one of the top struggles for remote workers, not because nomads are antisocial, but because the natural mechanics of friendship (bumping into the same person, sharing a meal, developing an inside joke) stop working when you're moving cities every few weeks. Coliving recreates those mechanics deliberately. Shared kitchens, communal dinners, people going through the same disorientation at the same time. You don't have to manufacture small talk when you're already cooking together at 8pm. In a coliving, community isn't a feature you opt into. It's a side effect of the setup itself. You don't need a strategy. You need a kitchen and 15 people who don't know each other yet.

Why do so many digital nomads feel lonely, even the sociable ones?

Nobody tells you this before you go full nomad: you can be surrounded by people 24 hours a day and still feel completely isolated.

Coffee shops. Co-working spaces. Hostels. They're full of humans. But they're full of humans who are each in their own bubble, headphones on, on deadline, half-present. You have the same four sentences with 30 different strangers over a week. "Where are you from?" "How long are you here?" "What do you do?" Then they leave, or you leave, and the whole thing resets.

According to Buffer's State of Remote Work, loneliness is consistently ranked among the top three struggles for remote workers year after year. And a 2022 Cigna survey found that 58% of Americans reported feeling lonely often or always — and that was before fully remote work became the norm for millions more people.

This isn't a personality problem. It's a structural one.

Traditional friendships form because of repetition and time. You become close with your colleagues not because they're especially interesting, but because you've seen them at 9am when they're barely functional, complained about the same things, shared lunch 300 times. Shared context builds automatically. It's not magic, it's just math.

When you're moving cities every month, that mechanic breaks. Every city is Day 1. Every connection starts from zero. By the time you've moved past "where are you from" with someone interesting, you're already packing your bag.

Coliving doesn't fix loneliness through programming or forced fun. It recreates the structural conditions that make friendship happen on its own.

What does coliving actually do that a hostel or Airbnb can't?

Hostels give you proximity. Airbnb gives you peace and quiet. Coliving gives you both, plus something neither of them can: a shared experience with the same group of people over an extended period of time.

The key variables are simple:

The solo Airbnb apartment is genuinely great for productivity. It is terrible for humans. You can go three days without talking to another person and it doesn't feel strange until it suddenly does. We've seen people arrive at Casa Basilico after two weeks of solo apartment travel looking like they'd accidentally signed up for a silent retreat.

why coliving beats solo Airbnb for remote workers

So how does community actually form? Is there a system?

No system. The mechanism is embarrassingly simple: food.

Not "optional communal dinners you have to sign up for." Not mixer events. Not icebreaker games. Not structured community calls.

Just food. Someone cooks. Everyone eats. Nobody wants to eat alone if there's a table with people and pasta on it.

At Casa Basilico, community dinners aren't scheduled team-building exercises. They're dinner. Fabio (the short Italian guy who insists on cooking for 30 people whether they asked for it or not) makes something, someone opens wine, someone else starts playing Spotify, and from there it's basically automatic. An hour later people are debating whether carbonara should have cream (it shouldn't, stop it), planning a day trip nobody will actually organise in advance, and exchanging numbers.

That's the whole community-building system. We're sorry it's not more complicated.

The research backs this up. A 2017 study published in Evolutionary Psychology found that shared meals are one of the strongest predictors of social bonding, more effective than one-on-one conversation for creating group cohesion. Food is the original community technology. Every culture on earth independently figured this out thousands of years ago.

What coliving does is remove the friction to access it. You don't have to plan, book a table, coordinate schedules, or convince a reluctant friend. You walk downstairs.

what life looks like inside a Casa Basilico chapter

What if you arrive and nobody talks to you on day one?

Honestly? Day one is always a bit weird.

You're in a new city, you don't know the space, you're travel-tired, and there are 15 strangers who seem to already know each other. It can feel like walking into a party where you only know the host and the host is busy fixing something in the kitchen.

We tell every person who arrives the same thing: show up for dinner. That's the entire strategy. You don't need to be charming or funny or have great stories. Just be present. Eat the food. Say something about the food. Ask who cooked it. You're in.

Most people report the same experience: by day three they can't imagine not knowing these people. By week two they're planning weekend trips together. By the end of the chapter they're talking about which future chapter they'll do together.

The initial weirdness is real, but it's short. And it's the same for everyone, which is weirdly comforting once you realise it.

Coliving also works unusually well for introverts. You don't have to engineer social situations. You don't have to plan anything. Private rooms exist for recharging. The communal areas are there when you want them, not obligatory when you don't. Some of the deepest connections in past chapters have come from people who'd describe themselves as introverts who just needed the infrastructure to already exist.

How do you actually build roots when you're only staying for a month?

This is the slowmad question. Community isn't only the people you live with. It's also knowing a neighbourhood, having a cafe where they remember your order, finding a local spot that feels like yours.

The trick is going deep on a few things instead of trying to see everything.

One neighbourhood. One market. One lunch spot you go back to three times. One consistent activity: morning runs, a cooking class, the Sunday market. When you stop treating a city like a checklist and start treating it like a temporary home, it responds differently. People recognise you. The taco lady knows what you want. You start to feel like you belong somewhere, even if it's only for 28 days.

A month is actually enough time to feel connected to a place. Most people are just spreading it too thin trying to see everything at once.

Casa Basilico chapters are designed around this idea. Oaxaca isn't a destination you're passing through. It's a city you're living in, with a group of people who are all doing the same thing, all trying to know this place properly before they leave.

what's included in the Oaxaca 2026 chapter

What's the difference between community and just hanging out?

There is one, and it matters.

Hanging out is great. But community means people show up for each other past the convenient part.

The alumni WhatsApp groups from past chapters are active, not because Casa Basilico manages them (we don't), but because the connections people form during a chapter are the kind that survive timezones and separate continents. People who met in Las Palmas in 2024 are now travelling together, working on shared projects, and visiting each other's home countries.

That doesn't happen at a hostel. It doesn't happen in a co-working space. It happens when you've shared enough real moments — the annoying things, the great nights, the morning someone burned the coffee and someone else went out to find the good stuff. That's when the relationship gets actual texture.

Sociologist Robin Dunbar's research suggests that close friendships require roughly 200 hours of shared time to develop properly. A month-long coliving chapter gives you more than enough time to get there with at least a handful of people.

Community is what happens when you stop travelling through life alone. 🫶

what a community dinner actually looks like

The Casa Basilico version of this

We built Casa Basilico because we both hit the same wall: good work, cool cities, full Instagram grids, and genuinely not enough people who actually knew us.

The answer wasn't better apps or more events. It was living with people in the same situation, in a city worth slowing down in, around a table with good food on it. That's still the whole model. Pop up in a city. Find a great house. Cook together. Make friends that last past the chapter.

If you're a digital nomad trying to build real community (not followers, not co-working neighbours, but actual people), come and try it.

Oaxaca 2026 is open. Limited spots. Early bird pricing still available for the first people who decide quickly.

Come join us in Oaxaca →

FAQ

How long does it take to feel part of the community in a coliving?

Most people feel comfortable by day 3-5. The first day or two can feel awkward, everyone is navigating the same "I don't know anyone here yet" energy at the same time. By the end of week one it's usually flipped completely: people feel like they've known each other much longer than they have. Shared meals and a group that's all figuring out the same new city accelerates things faster than almost any other social context.

Is coliving only for extroverts?

No, and this question comes up a lot. Coliving is better suited for introverts than conventional solo travel because the social infrastructure already exists. You don't have to engineer it. Private rooms mean genuine alone time when you need it. The communal areas are there when you want them. Several of the strongest connections formed in past Casa Basilico chapters were with people who would describe themselves as introverts. The setup works for them precisely because they don't have to manufacture anything.

What if I don't click with the group?

It happens occasionally and it's worth being honest about it. Not every group dynamic is perfect for every person. That said, Casa Basilico chapters are small enough (typically 15-25 people) that you're not lost in a crowd, and the natural sub-grouping that happens over meals and activities means most people find their people within the first week. If you've had a coliving experience where you felt like an outsider, it's often a sign the setup or the size was wrong, not you.

Can a month of coliving actually lead to lasting friendships?

Yes, and this one genuinely surprises people. The depth of connection that forms in a month of shared living regularly exceeds what people build in years of conventional city life with colleagues and neighbours. Alumni from past chapters are still in contact. Some have travelled together after. Some have collaborated professionally. Some have become close friends in the real sense of the word. Not guaranteed, but the conditions are unusually good.

How is Casa Basilico different from other colivings?

We're pop-up — no permanent location, no corporate HR, no anonymous 50-person building. Each chapter is one city, one group, one month. Food is central rather than incidental (Fabio cooks, and this is non-negotiable). It's closer to a dinner party that lasts 28 days than to a co-working space with beds attached. The community isn't a bonus feature. It's the whole thing.