Intentional communities 👥

What are intentional communities?

Intentional communities are planned residential collectives where individuals and families choose to live together based on shared values, goals, or lifestyles, often emphasizing sustainability, shared responsibilities, and communal living. These communities typically foster a cooperative environment and can be grounded in various philosophies or purposes, such as ecological, economic, or social objectives.

Different types of Intentional Communities

There are Intentional Communities, in which the community element predominates; there are some I. C. where almost no type of private property is recognized; in some cases, the same individual salaries belong to the entire group. There are other communities, of a more individualistic nature, in which private property and collective ownership perform different and complementary functions.

Smaller and bigger intentional communities

Intentional communities can involve a few units, a few tens or a few hundred people. When you reach the hundreds or thousands, it is more appropriate to talk about federations of communities.

This is the case, for example, of the famous sustainable city ‘Auroville, in South India, which has almost two thousand inhabitants but is then organized in different, smaller, community or community federations’ Damanhur, in Piedmont.

In this way the “dimension on a human scale” is always guaranteed, giving the possibility to recover that sense of community that seems to be lost today.

How does it differ from the term eco-village?

An ecovillage is a sustainable community, but a sustainable community is not always an ecovillage. Let’s try to better define the different forms that somehow come close to the idea of an ecovillage:

Intentional community

It is in principle “a group of two or more adults who have chosen to call themselves a community”. An ecovillage is generally an intentional community, but there are numerous intentional communities that have little or nothing to do with ecology and cannot be called ecovillage.

Cohabitation

Cohabitation is a cooperative lifestyle born in Denmark. It brings together the autonomy of private homes with many of the advantages of community life. In general, the residents, at least the initial ones, participate in the planning of the community so that it can respond as much as possible to their needs.