Lesson 01 of 11
What is an intentional community?
The definition that actually predicts daily life, and the three things people confuse it with.
Most people arrive at this subject with a picture already loaded: a farmhouse, a lot of people in their twenties, some pooled money and a certain amount of guitar. That picture is about fifty years old, describes one uncommon form, and is the single biggest obstacle to seeing the field as it is.
The useful definition is duller and much more predictive.
Three conditions
They chose each other. Membership is deliberate and mutual. Someone applied, or was invited, and somebody said yes. This rules out a street you happened to move into, however friendly, and it rules out a building whose residents share nothing but a landlord.
They live together or near each other. Under one roof, in clustered homes, or across a few adjoining properties — but physically close enough that the ordinary business of life overlaps. This rules out a network that meets annually and talks online in between, however real and well-organised that network is.
They have written down how they decide things. Not what they believe — how they decide. Who has a say, in what, and what happens when they disagree.
Two out of three is common, and it is where most of the disappointment in this field lives.
Why the written part carries the weight
A statement of values is worth writing and settles almost nothing. “We value transparency” cannot be broken, only disappointed. “Minutes are published within three days, and any member may see the accounts on request” can be broken — which is exactly what makes it useful, because a group can notice, name it, and act.
The agreements that matter in practice are unglamorous and procedural:
- How a decision is made, and by whom, and within what limits
- What each member owes financially, and when
- How somebody joins, and how somebody leaves
- What the community decides, and what it explicitly leaves alone
- What happens when an agreement is not kept
That last one is the most commonly missing. A rule with no stated consequence is a preference, and every member works out which is which inside a year.
The one before it is the most commonly unasked. People arrive at this subject with a worry they rarely say out loud — will these people be too involved in my life? — and it has an answerable version: what does this place claim authority over, and where does the claim stop? A community that has written that down can tell you whether your working hours, your visitors, your diet or your car are anybody else’s business. One that has not will decide each of them the first time it comes up, in a meeting, about a particular person.
What the label does not tell you
This is where most misunderstandings start, because the term is deliberately broad.
It does not mean shared income. That is a commune , one option inside the category and a minority one. The majority of intentional communities have entirely private finances — members hold their own jobs, pay their own bills, and share the cost of the roof.
It does not mean shared politics or a shared faith. Some are explicitly spiritual, many are explicitly not, and plenty contain people who disagree about most things and have simply agreed how to decide.
It does not mean rural. Urban housing co-operatives and city cohousing projects are intentional communities in exactly the same sense as a land-based ecovillage .
It does not mean giving up your home. In most forms you have your own front door, your own kitchen and your own bathroom.
Knowing that a place calls itself an intentional community therefore tells you very little on its own. It tells you these people organised themselves on purpose. What they actually share is a separate question, and it is the one worth asking first.
Is this an intentional community?
Four real-ish situations. Each one fails or passes on a single condition — chosen membership, proximity, or written agreements. Ruling cases out is the fastest way to learn the definition.
Where the term gets stretched
Two directions, and both are worth recognising.
Outward, by marketing. Developers occasionally sell conventional housing as community on the strength of a shared roof terrace and a residents’ messaging group. There is no membership process, nothing is self-governed, and the rules belong to the developer. Shared facilities are easy to build and easy to advertise; chosen membership and self-governance are neither.
Inward, by drift. Established communities sometimes keep the label for decades after the founders’ agreements stopped being read by anyone. Nothing was broken — the document simply stopped being consulted, new members never saw it, and the text now describes a place that no longer exists. This is the quieter failure, and the more common one.
What to ask on a visit
Sources & further reading
- 1 Foundation for Intentional Community — the directory since 1937, and the source of the umbrella definition
- 2 Communal Studies Association — the academic literature, including the journal Communal Societies
- 3 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
Words used here
- Intentional community
- A group who chose each other, live together or close by, and have written down how they decide things.
- Agreements
- The written rules a community has consented to. Distinct from values: agreements say what happens, and what follows when it does not.
- Cohousing
- Private self-contained homes clustered around shared facilities — usually a common house — with residents managing the whole.
- Ecovillage
- A community consciously designing its social, ecological, economic and cultural systems to regenerate the place it sits in.
- Commune
- A community that shares income and usually property, so membership means economic interdependence rather than proximity.