Intentional Communities

Intentional communities (sometimes called communes, alternative lifestyle groups, sustainable communities, and alternative communities) are formed when groups of people choose to live with or near enough to each other to carry out a shared lifestyle with a common purpose. Families in cohousing communities, students in student housing co-ops, meditators in ashrams, income-sharing workers in Israeli kibbutzim, and sustainability advocates in rural ecovillages all live in intentional communities.

What unites an intentional community is not just shared land or housing, but also the reason—the intention—for choosing a shared lifestyle. The Fellowship for Intentional Community describes an intentional community as the following:

• A group of people who have chosen to work together in pursuit of a common ideal or vision. Most, though not all, share land or housing. Intentional communities come in all shapes and sizes, and display amazing diversity in their common values, which may be social, economic, spiritual, political, and/or ecological. Some are rural, some urban. Some house members in a single residence, some in separate households. Some communities raise children; some don't. Some are secular, some are spiritually based, and others are both. (Christian 2002, p. 6)

One coauthor (Bill Metcalf) defines an intentional community as

• five 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 characterised by a “we-consciousness,” seeing themselves as a continuing group, separate from and in many ways better than the society from which they have emerged.

Indigenous tribal groups, although often living communally, are not intentional communities because their way of life is their society's norm. Even though their lifestyle is communal, prisoners and other institutionalized people do not live in intentional communities, because that communal living arrangement is by no means their choice.