Intentional community
An intentional community or commune is a voluntary residential community designed to foster a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork. Such communities typically promote shared values or beliefs, or pursue a common vision, which may be political, religious, utopian or spiritual, or are simply focused on the practical benefits of cooperation and mutual support. While some groups emphasise shared ideologies, others are centred on enhancing social connections, sharing resources, and creating meaningful relationships.
Some see intentional communities as alternative lifestyles. Others see them as impractical social experiments. Some see them as a natural human response to the isolation and fragmentation of modern housing, offering a return to the social bonds and collaborative spirit found in traditional village life. Others see them as ways to address problems that are seen as plaguing modern cities, such as alcohol abuse, poverty, unemployment and crime, especially when used in conjunction with emigration from industrialized countries and colonization of new lands.
The multitude of intentional communities includes collective households, cohousing communities, coliving, ecovillages, monasteries, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, Hutterite colonies, ashrams, and housing cooperatives.
As well, planned developments such as some company towns that provided comfortable workers' housing and aspirations of a stable sober workforce, could be considered intentional communities and sometimes even spark from an aspiration for a utopia.
History
are likely the earliest intentional communities, founded around 1500 BCE. Buddhist monasteries appeared around 500 BCE. Pythagoras founded an intellectual vegetarian commune in about 525 BCE in southern Italy.Over the last three hundreds years, hundreds of utopian communities were formed in Europe, North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand, with the intent to create a better, more sustainable world at least locally. This process is continuing in the modern age, as in the case of East Wind Community and green urbanism.
Synonyms and definitions
Additional terms referring to an intentional community can be alternative lifestyle, intentional society, cooperative community, withdrawn community, enacted community, socialist colony, communistic society, collective settlement, communal society, commune, mutualistic community, communitarian experiment, experimental community, utopian experiment, practical utopia, and utopian society.The term utopian community applied to an intentional community might be considered to be a pejorative. Many intentional communities do not consider themselves to be utopian.
The term commune is considered to be a negative term or even linked to leftist politics or hippies.
| Authorship | Year | Definition |
| B. Shenker | 1986 | "An intentional community is a relatively small group of people who have created a whole way of life for the attainment of a certain set of goals." |
| D. E. Pitzer | 1989 | Intentional communities are "small, voluntary social units partly isolated from the general society in which members share an economic union and lifestyle in an attempt to implement, at least in part, their ideal ideological, religious, political, social, economic, and educational systems". |
| G. Kozeny | 1996 | "An 'intentional community' is a group of people who have chosen to live together with a common purpose, working cooperatively to create a lifestyle that reflects their shared core values. The people may live together on a piece of rural land, in a suburban home, or in an urban neighborhood, and they may share a single residence or live in a cluster of dwellings." |
| W. J. Metcalf | 2004 | An intentional community is "ive or more people, drawn from more than one family or kinship group, who have voluntarily come together for the purpose of ameliorating perceived social problems and inadequacies. They seek to live beyond the bounds of mainstream society by adopting a consciously devised and usually well thought-out social and cultural alternative. In the pursuit of their goals, they share significant aspects of their lives together. Participants are characterized by a "we-consciousness," seeing themselves as a continuing group, separate from and in many ways better than the society from which they emerged." |
Variety
The purposes of intentional communities vary and may be political, spiritual, economic, and environmental.There are both secular communities and spiritual communities such as Christian intentional communities. One common practice, particularly in spiritual communities, is communal meals.
Members of Christian intentional communities aspire to emulating the practices of the earliest Christians. Using the biblical book of Acts as a model, these communities strive to demonstrate their faith in a corporate context, and to live out the teachings of the New Testament, practicing compassion and hospitality. Communities such as the Simple Way, the Bruderhof and Rutba House would fall into this category. Despite strict membership criteria, these communities are open to visitors and not reclusive to the extent of some other intentional communities.
A survey in the 1995 edition of the "Communities Directory", published by the Fellowship for Intentional Community, reported that 54 percent of the communities choosing to list themselves were rural, 28 percent were urban, and 10 percent had both rural and urban sites.
Some communities are based on Egalitarian values. Members have equal access to resources and decision-making, or more broadly individual members "possess equal rights and opportunities, supported by affirmative action". Egalitarian values can be combined with other values.
Benjamin Zablocki categorized communities this way:
- Academic communities
- Alternative-family communities
- Coliving communities
- Cooperative communities
- Countercultural communities, including the counterculture of the 1960s
- Egalitarian communities
- Experimental communities
- Political communities
- Psychological communities
- Rehabilitational communities
- Religious communities
- Spiritual communities
Governance
A hierarchical or authoritarian structure governs 9 percent of communities. About the same are a combination of democratic and hierarchical structure.
Communes
Communes are a general type of intentional communities.The central characteristics or core principles of communes were expressed differently over the years. The Suffolk-born radical John Goodwyn Barmby, subsequently a Unitarian minister, invented the term "" in 1840.
At the start of the 1970s, The New Communes author Ron E. Roberts classified communes as a subclass of a larger category of utopias. He listed three main characteristics:
- First, egalitarianism – communes specifically rejected hierarchy or graduations of social status as being necessary to social order.
- Second, human scale – members of some communes saw the scale of society as it was then organized as being too industrialized and therefore unsympathetic to human dimensions.
- Third, communes were consciously anti-bureaucratic.
Twenty-five years later, Dr. Bill Metcalf, in his edited book Shared Visions, Shared Lives, defined communes as having the following core principles:
- the importance of the group as opposed to the nuclear family unit
- a "common purse"
- a collective household
- group decision-making in general and intimate affairs
Sharing everyday life and facilities, a commune is an idealized form of family, being a new sort of "primary group". Commune members have emotional bonds to the whole group rather than to any sub-group, and the commune is experienced with emotions that go beyond just social collectivity.
However, Benjamin Zablocki writes in "Problems of Anarchism on Hippie Communes" that tensions could arise between the "original family" of commune members and new arrivals. He cites publicity in the media, sexual jealousies, and changes in leadership structure as potential reasons for these strains.
The Fellowship for Intentional Community defines a commune as an intentional community with 100% income sharing, the Fellowship's online directory lists 222 communes worldwide. Some of these are religious institutions such as abbeys and monasteries. Others are based in anthroposophic philosophy, including the Camphill villages, which provide support for the education, employment, and daily lives of adults and children with developmental disabilities, mental health problems or other special needs.
Many cultures practice natural communal or tribal living, and do not designate their way of life as a planned "commune" per se, though their practices have many characteristics of a commune.