Intentional community
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An intentional community is a voluntary residential community designed to foster a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork.[1][2][3] 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.[4] Others see them as impractical social experiments.[1][5] 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.[6] 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.[7]
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.[8]
- ^ a b Shenker, Barry (1986). Intentional Communities (Routledge Revivals) : Ideology and Alienation in Communal Societies. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203832639. ISBN 978-0-203-83263-9. Retrieved 20 September 2021.
- ^ Pitzer, D. E. (1989). "Developmental communalism: An alternative approach to communal studies". Utopian Thought and Communal Experience: 68–76.
- ^ Metcalf, William James (2004). The Findhorn book of community living. Forres, Scotland: Findhorn Press. ISBN 9781844090327.
- ^ Butcher, A. A. (2002). Communal Economics (PDF). Retrieved 20 September 2021.
- ^ Rubin, Zach (31 August 2020). ""A Not-so-silent Form of Activism": Intentional Community as Collective Action Reservoir". Humanity & Society. 45 (4): 509–532. doi:10.1177/0160597620951945. ISSN 0160-5976. S2CID 225187879. Retrieved 20 September 2021.
- ^ "What is Cohousing?". Canadian Cohousing Network. Archived from the original on 2022-02-01. Retrieved 1 February 2022.
- ^ Claeys, Searching for Utopia, p. 122
- ^ Buder, Stanley. Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning, 1880 - 1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.