Intentional community
An intentional community is a voluntary residential community which is designed to have a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork.[1][2][3] 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".[4] Intentional communities can be seen as social experiments or communal experiments.[1][5] The multitude of intentional communities includes collective households, cohousing communities, coliving, ecovillages, monasteries, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, Hutterites, ashrams, and housing cooperatives.
"Collective settlement", "Utopian society", and "Utopian experiment" redirect here. For the legal term, see Settlement (litigation). For the film, see The Utopian Society. For other uses of "Utopian experiment", see Utopian experiment (disambiguation).History[edit]
Ashrams are likely the earliest intentional communities, founded around 1500 BCE. Buddhist monasteries appeared around 500 BCE.[6] Pythagoras founded an intellectual vegetarian commune in about 525 BCE in southern Italy.[7] Hundreds of modern intentional communities were formed across Europe, North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand out of the intellectual foment of utopianism.[7] Intentional communities exhibit the utopian ambition to create a better, more sustainable world for living.[7] Nevertheless, the term utopian community as a synonym for an intentional community might be considered to be of pejorative nature and many intentional communities do not consider themselves to be utopian.[1] Also the alternative term commune[a] is considered to be non-neutral or even linked to leftist politics or hippies.[9][10][11]
The purposes of intentional communities vary and may be political, spiritual, economic, or environmental.[14] In addition to spiritual communities, secular communities also exist.[15] One common practice, particularly in spiritual communities, is communal meals.[16] Egalitarian values can be combined with other values.[17] Benjamin Zablocki categorized communities this way:[18]
Membership[edit]
Members of Christian intentional communities want to emulate the practices of the earliest believers. Using the biblical book of Acts (and, often, the Sermon on the Mount) as a model, members of these communities strive to demonstrate their faith in a corporate context,[19] and to live out the teachings of the New Testament, practicing compassion and hospitality.[20] 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.[21]
A survey in the 1995 edition of the "Communities Directory", published by the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC), reported that 54 percent of the communities choosing to list themselves were rural, 28 percent were urban, 10 percent had both rural and urban sites, and 8 percent did not specify.[22]
Governance[edit]
The most common form of governance in intentional communities is democratic (64 percent), with decisions made by some form of consensus decision-making or voting. A hierarchical or authoritarian structure governs 9 percent of communities, 11 percent are a combination of democratic and hierarchical structure, and 16 percent do not specify.[22]
The central characteristics of communes, or core principles that define communes, have been expressed in various forms over the years. The Suffolk-born radical John Goodwyn Barmby (1820-1881), subsequently a Unitarian minister, invented the term "communitarian"[23] in 1840.[24]
At the start of the 1970s, The New Communes author Ron E. Roberts classified communes as a subclass of a larger category of utopias.[25] He listed three main characteristics:[26]
Twenty-five years later, Dr. Bill Metcalf, in his edited book Shared Visions, Shared Lives, defined communes as having the following core principles:[27]
Sharing everyday life and facilities, a commune is an idealized form of family, being a new sort of "primary group" (generally with fewer than 20 people, although there are examples of much larger communes). 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.[28]