Intentional Communities

Definitions

Examples of intentional communities (in the past called “communes,” “alternative lifestyle groups,” and “alternative communities”) include cohousing communities in major cities, Israeli kibbutzim, fundamentalist Christian communes, and ecovillages. Ecovillages are intentional communities in which people can live, work, buy food and other things they need, socialize, and pursue their spiritual or religious interests on-site; and these activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural landscape and can be continued into the indefinite future. Most aspiring ecovillages intend to one-day grow or raise their own organic food and use passive-solar natural buildings, off-grid power, wastewater recycling, and so on.

The first known intentional community was probably Homakoeion, established near Crotone, Italy, by the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras about 525 BCE. Other writers argue that Indian [Page 736]ashrams (small communities with a guru and his or her followers), in about 1500 BCE, should have this honor, although the evidence is unclear. The oldest operational intentional community in the world is probably Sabbathday Lake, a Shaker commune established in 1794 near Poland, Maine, United States. Sabbathday Lake had about 150 members in the early nineteenth century, with membership slowly declining to a dozen but now growing again.

The Fellowship for Intentional Community describes an intentional community this way:

Bill Metcalf (2004) derived a widely used formal definition of an intentional community:

Many indigenous groups live communally but are not considered to be intentional communities because they live according to their social norms rather than according to any consciously devised intention. For the same reasons prisoners and other people in institutions do not live in intentional communities even though they live communally.

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