Intentional community
A group who chose each other, live together or close by, and have written down how they decide things.
This is a word people use loosely, so check it against what is actually held in common: land, income, decisions, or only good will. Communities that use the term precisely will tell you, unprompted, which of those they share and which they do not.
An intentional community is a group of people who chose each other, live together or near each other, and have written down how they make decisions. Three conditions, and the third is the one that does the sorting.
Chosen-ness rules out a street you happened to move into. Proximity rules out a network that only meets online. Written agreements rule out a group of friends who share a house and assume goodwill will hold — and it is the absence of that third condition, far more than any failure of idealism, that ends most attempts.
What the written part actually covers
Not values. Values are easy to agree and impossible to enforce. The agreements that matter are procedural and unglamorous: how a decision is made and by whom, what money each person owes and when, what happens when someone stops paying or stops turning up, how a person joins, and how a person leaves. A community that has agreed a beautiful statement of purpose and nothing about exit has agreed nothing.
An example
The umbrella term as used today is largely the Foundation for Intentional Community’s, which has catalogued communities in North America since 1937 and deliberately covers everything from cohousing to commune to housing co-ops and ecovillages . That breadth is the point: the label describes a legal and social arrangement, not a lifestyle or an ideology. Two communities both accurately called intentional can share nothing beyond having written their rules down.
Where the term gets stretched
Two directions, both worth watching for. Developers occasionally market conventional housing as an intentional community on the strength of a shared garden and a residents’ WhatsApp group — no agreements, no membership process, no way to leave that anyone has thought about. And established communities sometimes keep the label decades after the founders’ agreements stopped being read by anyone, which is its own kind of drift.
Sources & further reading
- 1 Foundation for Intentional Community — the long-running directory and the source of the umbrella definition
- 2 RCOS Core — Layer 0: Identity & Scope — how a community states what it is, what it is not, and what it does not govern
Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked. How this is written
Related terms
Private self-contained homes clustered around shared facilities — usually a common house — with residents managing the whole.
A community consciously designing its social, ecological, economic and cultural systems to regenerate the place it sits in.
A community that shares income and usually property, so membership means economic interdependence rather than proximity.