WAn intentional community is a voluntary residential community designed from the start to have a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision, often follow an alternative lifestyle and typically share responsibilities and property. Intentional communities can be seen as social experiments or also communal experiments. The multitude of intentional communities includes collective households, cohousing communities, coliving, ecovillages, monasteries, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, hutterites, ashrams, and housing cooperatives.
WCohousing is an intentional community of private homes clustered around shared space. The term originated in Denmark in late 1960s. Each attached or single family home has traditional amenities, including a private kitchen. Shared spaces typically feature a common house, which may include a large kitchen and dining area, laundry, and recreational spaces. Shared outdoor space may include parking, walkways, open space, and gardens. Neighbors also share resources like tools and lawnmowers.
WThe Communities Directory, A Comprehensive Guide to Intentional Community provides listing of intentional communities primarily from North America but also from around the world. The Communities Directory has both an and a print edition, which is published based on data from the website.
WThe Foundation for Intentional Community (FIC), formerly the Fellowship of Intentional Communities then the Fellowship for Intentional Community, provides publications, referrals, support services, and "sharing opportunities" for a wide range of intentional communities, cohousing groups, ecovillages, community networks, support organizations, and people seeking a home in community. The FIC is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization in the United States.
WAwra Amba is an Ethiopian intentional community of about 463 people, located 73 kilometres east of Bahir Dar in the Fogera woreda of Debub Gondar Zone. It was founded in 1980 with the goal of solving socio-economic problems through helping one another in an environment of egalitarianism — in marked contrast to the traditional norms of Amhara society. The name means "Top of the Hill" in Amharic.
WBraziers Park is a Grade II* country house and estate on the edge of Ipsden - a small village near Wallingford, Oxfordshire, England - housing a secular intentional community and the School of Integrative Social Research. It has also been used as a film location for large- and small-budget films.
WBreitenbush Hot Springs Retreat & Conference Center, is a worker-owned co-op featuring holistic and spiritual retreats. It is surrounded by the Willamette National Forest in Marion County, Oregon, United States, 10 miles (16 km) east-northeast of Detroit along the West Cascades Scenic Byway and 12 miles (19 km) northwest of Mount Jefferson. The closest metropolitan area, Salem, is approximately 60 miles (100 km) to the west. The retreat center is located at the site of the historic Breitenbush Hot Springs, which drain into the adjacent Breitenbush River.
WBrook Farm, also called the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education or the Brook Farm Association for Industry and Education, was a utopian experiment in communal living in the United States in the 1840s. It was founded by former Unitarian minister George Ripley and his wife Sophia Ripley at the Ellis Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1841 and was inspired in part by the ideals of transcendentalism, a religious and cultural philosophy based in New England. Founded as a joint stock company, it promised its participants a portion of the profits from the farm in exchange for performing an equal share of the work. Brook Farmers believed that by sharing the workload, ample time would be available for leisure activities and intellectual pursuits.
WThe Bruderhof is an Anabaptist Christian movement that was founded in Germany in 1920 by Eberhard Arnold. The movement has communities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Paraguay, and Australia.
WBryn Gweled is a small community in Upper Southampton Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Described variously as an "intentionally cooperative community" and "more like a commune", Bryn Gweled consists of 75 privately owned homes on 240 acres (0.97 km2) of collectively owned land.
WErnest Callenbach was an American author, film critic, editor, and simple living adherent. He became famous due to his internationally successful semi-utopian novel Ecotopia (1975).
WThe Capitol Hill Occupied Protest or the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP), originally Free Capitol Hill and later the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), was an occupation protest and self-declared autonomous zone in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. The zone, originally covering six city blocks and Cal Anderson Park, was established on June 8, 2020, by George Floyd protesters after the Seattle Police Department (SPD) left its East Precinct building. The zone was cleared of occupants by police on July 1. Its formation was preceded by a week of tense interactions between protesters and police in riot gear which began on June 1 and escalated on June 7 after a man drove his vehicle into the crowd and shot a protester near 11th Avenue and Pine Street. Tear gas, flashbangs and pepper spray were used by police in the densely populated residential neighborhood. On June 7, the SPD reported that the crowd was throwing rocks, bottles and fireworks and shining green lasers into officers' eyes. The next day, police boarded up their building and moved out of the East Precinct in an effort to de-escalate the situation.
WCecília Colony was an experimental commune based on anarchist principles. The colony was founded in 1890, in the municipality of Palmeira, in the state of Paraná, by a group of libertarians mobilized by the Italian writer and agronomist Giovanni Rossi.
WCelo Community is a communal settlement in the Western mountains of North Carolina, located in the South Toe River valley of Yancey County. It was founded in 1937 by Arthur Ernest Morgan. Celo is a land trust with its own rules of taxation and land tenure that runs its internal government by consensus. The community does not require its members to accept any religion or ideology, but is based on ideals of cooperation between residents and care for the natural environment. However, its membership is predominantly Quaker. Celo has 40 families living on its 1,200 acres (4.9 km2).
WFreetown Christiania, also known as Christiania, is an intentional community and commune of about 850 to 1,000 residents, covering 7.7 hectares in the borough of Christianshavn in the Danish capital city of Copenhagen.
WCoed Hills Rural Artspace is situated close to the village of St Hilary in the Vale of Glamorgan, approximately 8 miles (13 km) west of Cardiff.
WA community orchard is a collection of fruit trees shared by communities and growing in publicly accessible areas such as public greenspaces, parks, schools, churchyards, allotments or, in the US, abandoned lots. Such orchards are a shared resource and not managed for personal or business profit. Income may be generated to sustain the orchard as a charity, community interest company, or other non-profit structure. What they have in common is that they are cared for by a community of people.
WCornerstone Community is an Australian non-denominational evangelical Christian training and mission movement.
WJohn Curl is an American poet, memoirist, translator, author, activist and historian.
WThe Federation of Damanhur, often called simply Damanhur, is a commune, ecovillage, and spiritual community situated in the Piedmont region of northern Italy about 50 kilometres (31 mi) north of the city of Turin. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the Chiusella Valley, bordering on the Gran Paradiso National Park. The community has its own constitution and currency, the Credito.
WDetention River Christian Community, formerly known as Rocky Cape Christian Community is an Anabaptist Christian community, located between Smithton and Wynyard on the Australian island of Tasmania. The community was founded in 2005 by Elmendorf Christian Community in Minnesota, a community of Hutterite tradition. Detention River is affiliated with the Hutterite Christian Communities.
WErraid is a tidal island approximately one mile square located in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. It lies west of Mull and southeast of Iona. The island receives about 1,000 millimetres (40 in) of rain and 1,350 hours of sunshine annually, making it one of the driest and sunniest places on the western seaboard of Scotland. It is attended by numerous uninhabited small islets, the largest being Eilean Dubh, Eilean nam Muc, Eilean Chalmain, Eilean Ghomain and Eilean na Seamair.
WFort Pitt Farms Christian Community is a Christian Community of Dariusleut Hutterite origin and of many Hutterite traditions, but that is fully autonomous since 1999. It is located in Frenchman Butte, Saskatchewan, Canada close to Fort Pitt Provincial Park. Its spiritual leaders are Reuben Walter and Ben Walter.
WFree and Real is a non-profit organisation and experimental eco-cohousing community located in the municipality of Istiaia-Aidipsos, northern Euboea, Greece, about 200 km (120 mi) north-west of Athens. The organisation is primarily a school for self-sufficiency/sustainability, and a research centre for ways of living in harmony with nature.
WHolberg is a former ferry terminal about 35 kilometres (22 mi) from the northwest tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. This unincorporated community is at the head of Holberg Inlet, which forms the western arm of Quatsino Sound.
WA housing cooperative, or housing co-op, is a legal entity, usually a cooperative or a corporation, which owns real estate, consisting of one or more residential buildings; it is one type of housing tenure. Housing cooperatives are a distinctive form of home ownership that have many characteristics that differ from other residential arrangements such as single family home ownership, condominiums and renting.
WA kibbutz is an intentional community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. The first kibbutz, established in 1909, was Degania. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economic branches, including industrial plants and high-tech enterprises. Kibbutzim began as utopian communities, a combination of socialism and Zionism. In recent decades, some kibbutzim have been privatized and changes have been made in the communal lifestyle. A member of a kibbutz is called a kibbutznik.
WThe Kuzbass Autonomous Industrial Colony was an experiment in workers' control in the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1926 during the New Economic Policy. It was based in Shcheglovsk, Kuzbass, Siberia.
WThe Likatier tribe is a pseudo-religious community of about 200 people who live and work together in Füssen in the south of Germany. Wolfgang Wankmiller founded the group in 1974. since there had been indecent assaults of children within the "Likatier", the group withdaw from puplic. Wankmiller is said to be father of 15 children from different womean.
WMa'ale Tzviya, also Tzviya, is a community settlement in northern Israel. Located in the Galilee to the south-east of Karmiel, it falls under the jurisdiction of Misgav Regional Council. In 2019 it had a population of 331.
WNeve Shalom, also known as Wāħat as-Salām is a cooperative village in Israel, jointly founded by Israeli Jews and Arabs in an attempt to show that the two peoples can live side by side peacefully, as well as to conduct educational work for peace, equality and understanding between the two peoples. The village is located on one of the two Latrun hilltops overlooking the Ayalon Valley, and lies midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Falling under the jurisdiction of Mateh Yehuda Regional Council, in 2019 it had a population of 323.
WNokken is a self-built community located on the north-west coast of Amager, just south of Islands Brygge, in Copenhagen, Denmark.
WNrityagram is India's first modern Gurukul for Indian classical dances and an intentional community in the form of a dance village, set up by Odissi dancer Protima Gauri in 1990. The residential school offers training in Indian classical dance forms, Odissi, Mohiniattam, Kathak, Bharatnatyam, Kuchipudi, Kathakali and Manipuri, eight hours a day, six days a week for seven years, following the ancient Guru-shishya tradition. Designed by famous Indian architect Gerard da Cunha, the community is situated near Hesaraghatta Lake 30 km from Bengaluru. Today the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble has performed across India and in many countries abroad.
WThe Rainbow Family of Living Light is a counter-culture, in existence since approximately 1970. It is a loose affiliation of individuals, some nomadic, generally asserting that it has no leader. They put on yearly, primitive camping events on public land known as Rainbow Gatherings.
WAnastasianism or the Ringing Cedars is a new religious movement, often classified as New Age, that started in central Russia in 1997 and has since spread across the world. Ringing Cedars' Anastasians are sometimes categorised by scholars as part of Rodnovery, and often as a modern Pagan movement of their own. The Anastasians also define their life conception as Russian Vedism and themselves as Vedrussians (ведруссы), and Anastasianism has therefore often been classified among the various self-styled "Vedic" religions arising in post-Soviet Russia.
WSointula is an isolated village on Malcolm Island in British Columbia, Canada. Lying between Vancouver Island and the British Columbia mainland, northeast of Port McNeill and not far from Alert Bay, the island is part of the historic and present territory of the ‘Namgis First Nation. At the 2011 census, the village had a population of 576, down 3.0% from the 2006 census.
WThe Subsistence Homesteads Division of the United States Department of the Interior was a New Deal agency that was intended to relieve industrial workers and struggling farmers from complete dependence on factory or agricultural work. The program was created to provide relatively low-cost homesteads, including a home and small plots of land that would allow people to sustain themselves. Through the program, 34 communities were built. Unlike subsistence farming, subsistence homesteading is based on a family member or members having part-time, paid employment.
WSvanholm is a country estate and former manor 55 kilometres (34 mi) west of Copenhagen, Denmark. In 1978 an association of over 100 persons bought the estate to create Denmark's largest intentional community. The Svanholm collective grows its own food and was one of the pioneers of organic farming in Denmark. As of January 2006, membership consisted of 70 adults and 35 children aged 0 to 80, jointly owning around 400 hectares of farmland, park, and woodlands.
WSymphony Way Informal Settlement was a small community of pavement dwellers that lived on Symphony Way, a main road in Delft, South Africa, from February 2008 till late 2009. They were a group of families that were evicted in February 2008 from the N2 Gateway Houses.
WTamera is a peace research village with the goal of becoming "a self-sufficient, sustainable and duplicable communitarian model for nonviolent cooperation and cohabitation between humans, animals, nature, and Creation for a future of peace for all." It is also often called a "healing biotope". Literally translated, "biotope" simply means a place where life lives. In Tamera, however, "healing biotope" is also described as a "greenhouse of trust, an acupuncture point of peace, and a self-sufficient future community." It is located on 335 acres (1.36 km2) in the Alentejo region of southwestern Portugal.
WThe medieval village of Torri Superiore has been described as "a little jewel of popular architecture." It is located in the Liguria in Italy, near Ventimiglia, a few kilometres from the Mediterranean Sea and the French border. Its complex structure is developed on eight levels, with three main buildings separated by two partially covered inner alleys.
WA youth village is a boarding school model first developed in Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s to care for groups of children and teenagers fleeing the Nazis. Henrietta Szold and Recha Freier were the pioneers in this sphere, known as youth aliyah, creating an educational facility that was a cross between a European boarding school and a kibbutz.
WZEGG is an ecovillage located on the outskirts of Bad Belzig, Germany, about 80 km (50 mi) south-west of Berlin.