The forms, told apart

People tend to arrange these words on a ladder, with cohousing at the mild end and commune at the committed end. It is an understandable picture and it is wrong, and holding it makes the field impossible to read.

The words are answering different questions. Cohousing describes an architecture. Ecovillage describes a purpose. Commune describes an economy. Co-operative and community land trust describe legal ownership. Asking whether a place is a cohousing or an ecovillage is a bit like asking whether a building is brick or a school.

The four, side by side

Cohousing is a shape

Cohousing Cohousing Private self-contained homes clustered around shared facilities — usually a common house — with residents managing the whole. is private, self-contained homes clustered around facilities the residents own and run: almost always a **common house** with a kitchen big enough to cook for everyone, often a laundry, a workshop and guest rooms that individual homes were built small enough to do without.

Four features recur almost everywhere the form appears. Residents take part in the design. The site is laid out so that encounter is likely — cars at the edge, front doors facing a shared path. The facilities are genuinely shared rather than merely communal-looking. And the community runs itself, with no landlord and no developer who stayed on.

Crucially, households keep their own money. That single fact removes most of the disputes that break other kinds of community, and removes most of the interdependence that makes them meaningful to the people who want that.

Ecovillage is an aim

Ecovillage Ecovillage A community consciously designing its social, ecological, economic and cultural systems to regenerate the place it sits in. is a claim about purpose: a community consciously designing its social, cultural, ecological and economic systems to _regenerate_ the place it sits in, in the Global Ecovillage Network's framing. Note the word — regenerate, not merely harm less. A settlement that recycles diligently is making a different and smaller claim.

Notice how much the definition leaves open. It says nothing about whether you own your home, whether there is a common kitchen, or how many people live there. That is why the label covers places as different as a three-household land project and a settlement of several hundred, and why it carries less information than people expect.

Commune is an economy

In a commune Commune A community that shares income and usually property, so membership means economic interdependence rather than proximity., members pool income. Earnings go into a common pot and needs come out of it.

The consequence people underestimate is not financial. It is that a shared purse makes almost everything a group matter: if the community pays for your dentistry and your trip to see your mother, the community has a legitimate interest in both, and needs an agreed way to say no without it feeling like a tribunal. Communes that work have usually spent years building exactly that.

The compensating advantage is hard to get any other way. A shared purse makes care affordable — illness, a new child, retraining. Nobody negotiates for it.

Co-operatives and land trusts are legal shells

These sit underneath the others rather than beside them.

In a housing co-operative Housing co-operative Members collectively own the entity that owns the building, and hold a right to occupy rather than a deed to a flat., members collectively own the organisation that owns the building and hold a share plus a right to occupy. In a community land trust Community land trust A non-profit holds land permanently and leases it to residents who own their buildings, separating the two so homes stay affordable after the first sale., a non-profit holds the land permanently and leases it to residents who own their buildings — so the land is off the market and the housing stays affordable to the next household.

Neither says anything about how much people share socially. A co-op can be a close community or an ordinary block of flats with a shared freehold.

The question that actually sorts them

Forget the labels and ask what is held in common. There are four things it can be, and the answer is rarely all of them:

Land — do the members collectively control the ground and the buildings, or does each own their own? Income — does money pool, or does each household keep its own? Decisions — what is decided collectively, and what is nobody else’s business? Goodwill only — is anything actually shared, or is this proximity plus warmth?

A community that uses these words precisely will answer all four without hesitating, and often before you finish asking. One that cannot is telling you something too.

What to ask on a visit

Sources & further reading

1. 1 Cohousing vs ecovillage — the two most-confused labels, told apart properly
2. 2 Commune vs cohousing — the money question, in detail
3. 3 Global Ecovillage Network — the ecovillage definition and its four dimensions
4. 4 Foundation for Intentional Community — the directory, and the breadth of what the umbrella covers
5. 5 Mietshäuser Syndikat — the building blocks of the network — the 51/49 house company, and the veto that makes reprivatisation take two
6. 6 Diggers & Dreamers — UK directory and publications, useful for European vocabulary

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