This is a list of intentional communities . An intentional community is a planned residential community designed from the start to have a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision and often follow an alternative lifestyle. They typically share responsibilities and resources. Intentional communities include collective households, co-housing communities, co-living, ecovillages, monasteries, communes, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, ashrams, and housing cooperatives. For directories, see external links below.
A utopia typically describes an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or near-perfect qualities for its members. It was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, which describes a fictional island society in the New World.
An ecovillage is a traditional or intentional community with the goal of becoming more socially, culturally, economically, and/or ecologically sustainable. An ecovillage strives to produce the least possible negative impact on the natural environment through intentional physical design and resident behavior choices. It is consciously designed through locally owned, participatory processes to regenerate and restore its social and natural environments. Most range from a population of 50 to 250 individuals, although some are smaller, and traditional ecovillages are often much larger. Larger ecovillages often exist as networks of smaller sub-communities. Some ecovillages have grown through like-minded individuals, families, or other small groups—who are not members, at least at the outset—settling on the ecovillage's periphery and participating de facto in the community. There are currently more than 10,000 ecovillages around the world.
Cohousing is an intentional, self-governing, cooperative community where residents live in private homes often clustered around shared space. The term originated in Denmark in the late 1960s. Families live in attached or single-family homes with traditional amenities, usually including a private kitchenette. As part of the communal orientation, shared spaces typically feature a common house, which may include a large kitchen and dining area, laundry, and recreational spaces. Walkways, open space, parking, playgrounds and gardens are common examples of shared outdoor spaces designed to promote social interactions. Neighbors also often share resources like tools, babysitting and creative skills.
Twin Oaks Community is an ecovillage and intentional community of about one hundred people living on 450 acres (1.8 km2) in Louisa County, Virginia. It is a member of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities. Founded in 1967, it is one of the longest-enduring and largest secular intentional communities in North America. The community's core values are cooperation, egalitarianism, nonviolence, sustainability, and income sharing. About 100 adults and 17 children live in the community.
The Bruderhof is a communal Anabaptist Christian movement that was founded in Germany in 1920 by Eberhard Arnold. The movement has communities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Paraguay, South Korea and Australia. The Bruderhof practises believer's baptism, non-violence and peacemaking, common ownership, the proclamation of the gospel, and lifelong faithfulness in marriage. The Bruderhof is an intentional community as defined by the Fellowship for Intentional Community.
An intentional community is a voluntary residential community which is designed to have a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision, and typically share responsibilities and property. This way of life is sometimes characterized as an "alternative lifestyle". Intentional communities can be seen as social experiments or communal experiments. The multitude of intentional communities includes collective households, cohousing communities, coliving, ecovillages, monasteries, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, Hutterites, ashrams, and housing cooperatives.
An alternative lifestyle or unconventional lifestyle is a lifestyle perceived to be outside the norm for a given culture. The term alternative lifestyle is often used pejoratively. Description of a related set of activities as alternative is a defining aspect of certain subcultures.
Common ownership refers to holding the assets of an organization, enterprise or community indivisibly rather than in the names of the individual members or groups of members as common property.
The Foundation for Intentional Community (FIC), formerly the Fellowship of Intentional Communities then the Fellowship for Intentional Community, provides publications, referrals, support services, and "sharing opportunities" for a wide range of intentional communities including: cohousing groups, community land trusts, communal societies, class-harmony communities, housing cooperatives, cofamilies, and ecovillages, along with community networks, support organizations, and people seeking a home in community. The FIC is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization in the United States.
Yarrow is a small community located 90 kilometres east of Vancouver within the City of Chilliwack in British Columbia, Canada. It is in the Fraser Valley at the foot of Vedder Mountain. The village was first settled by Mennonites in the late 1920s, following the draining of Sumas Lake and the reclamation of the former lake bed for agriculture.
Diana Leafe Christian is an author, former editor of Communities magazine, and nationwide speaker and workshop presenter on starting new ecovillages, on sustainability, on building communities, and on governance by sociocracy. She lives in an off-grid homestead at Earthaven Ecovillage in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, U.S. She has said that living in an intentional community "is the longest, most expensive, personal growth workshop you will ever take," though others are also associated with this quotation and it's unclear who originated it.
Intentional living is any lifestyle based on an individual or group's conscious attempts to live according to their values and beliefs. These can include lifestyles based on religious, political or ethical values, as well as for self-improvement.
The Brotherhood Church is a Christian anarchist and pacifist community. An intentional community with Quaker origins has been located at Stapleton, near Pontefract, Yorkshire, since 1921.
The Yarrow Ecovillage is an intentional community in Yarrow, British Columbia, Canada. Yarrow is a settlement of 3,000 population within the municipal boundaries of Chilliwack, British Columbia. The Ecovillage is a member-designed community that aims to achieve a more socially, ecologically and economically sustainable way of life. The Ecovillage's master plan for the 10-hectare (25-acre) former dairy farm, foresaw three main legal entities: An 8-hectare (20-acre) organic farm, a 31-unit multigenerational cohousing community, and a mixed-use development with just under 2800 m2 of commercial space, a 17-unit senior cohousing community and a learning centre.
Utopian socialism is the term often used to describe the first current of modern socialism and socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, and Robert Owen. Utopian socialism is often described as the presentation of visions and outlines for imaginary or futuristic ideal societies, with positive ideals being the main reason for moving society in such a direction. Later socialists and critics of utopian socialism viewed utopian socialism as not being grounded in actual material conditions of existing society. These visions of ideal societies competed with revolutionary and social democratic movements.
Yaacov Oved is a historian and Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Tel Aviv University, member of Kibbutz Palmachim, research fellow at Yad Tabenkin: the institute of research and documentation of the kibbutz movement, researcher of the history of communes in the world and co- founder of the International Communal Studies Association.
Home Colony was an anarchist colony on Puget Sound in Washington State from 1898 to 1909. Its founders were members of a former Bellamyite colony who bought 26 acres and formally organized as the Mutual Home Association in January 1898. Colonists purchased one or two acres and the proceeds purchased new land for the colony. Its colonists lived as individuals rather than cooperatively and tolerated a wide degree of social practices, including free love, free speech. They organized few cooperative institutions aside from a cooperative store (1902), some mutual construction projects, and a weekly anarchist paper, Discontent: Mother of Progress. When the newspaper was fined for obscenity, they replaced it with The Demonstrator. The original 40 colonists grew to 91 by 1900 and 155 by 1906. The colony's numerous visiting speakers included Emma Goldman. Following 1909 changes to the association's articles of incorporation allowed land to transfer from their mutual trust to private ownership, Home declined as a cooperative community but remained a home for anarchists.
Earthaven is an ecovillage in Western North Carolina, about 50 minutes from Asheville.
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Acorn Community Farm [is] a self-described "farm-based, anarchist, eco-conscienced, secular, egalitarian community"
[I]n 1890 Dr Giovanni Rossi, an Italian agronomist, founded in the famous Cecilia colony in Parana one of the first anarchist communities in Latin America.