Intentional Communities

The phrase covers an ecovillage in Portugal, a cohousing block in Copenhagen, and a farm in Missouri where nobody has a private income. What they share is not architecture or ideology. It is that the arrangement was chosen and made explicit, rather than inherited.

That is also the useful test when you are looking at a place and trying to work out what it actually is. Not how green is it or how radical does it sound, but: what do these people share, who decides, and what happens when someone wants to leave?

The forms they take

Four labels do most of the work, and they answer different questions.

Two of these get confused constantly, because an ecovillage often uses cohousing architecture. Cohousing and ecovillage told apart is the longer answer.

A better way to tell them apart

Labels describe what a place calls itself. These five dimensions describe what it actually is, and they predict daily life far better:

Two places calling themselves ecovillages can sit at opposite ends of every row. Two places with different labels can be nearly identical. Ask about the five, not the name.

The first row is the one communities answer worst. Ask why a place exists and you will get five good things — affordability, ecology, raising children well, growing food, not being lonely. All five are real, and on an ordinary day they do not compete. What is worth finding out is which one wins: a purpose is less a mission statement than a tie-breaker, the thing a group agreed to fall back on the year the solar array and the second family’s deposit want the same money and neither side is being unreasonable.

A community that cannot name one has not avoided the choice. It has deferred it to whoever is most persuasive on the night.

Which kind of community fits you?

Five questions, along the five dimensions that actually predict daily life. There is no right answer — the point is to find out what you are looking for before you go looking.

1. What would you most want the place to be for?

Knowing my neighbours and not raising a family alone Healing a piece of land and living from it Building a shared life, not just shared facilities Somewhere secure I can actually afford, long term

2. How much would you want money to be shared?

Not at all — my income stays mine Shared costs and some shared assets Most things pooled, with a common budget Everything — one purse, needs met from it

3. How should decisions get made?

Lightly — I would rather not be in many meetings By consent, with written agreements everyone can see Together and at length, even when it is slow Mostly delegated to people who know the subject

4. What would you want to own?

My home, outright A share of something held in common Nothing personally — the land belongs to the project I would want that decided carefully, not quickly

5. Where and how would you want to live?

In or near a town, with my current work and life Rural, hands in the soil, a slower income As self-reliant as possible, off-grid if I can Somewhere I can leave and return to without drama

What each result means

Cohousing

Your own front door and your own finances, with neighbours you actually know. The lowest-risk form here: if it does not work out you sell a home much like any other. Best when you want company and shared facilities rather than a shared economy.

Ecovillage

The ecological work is the point — land, water, food, the long horizon. Expect far more variation in what you are joining, and read carefully: the label is self-applied and covers everything from three households to several hundred.

Commune or income-sharing community

Shared income and usually shared property. It removes internal wealth gaps and most wage-based hierarchy, and it asks for the deepest interdependence of any form here. Read the exit terms before anything else.

Housing co-operative or land trust

A legal structure more than a lifestyle: the land or building is held collectively and you hold a right to live there. Strong on affordability and permanence, lighter on shared daily life than the other three.

How decisions actually get made

This is the part that decides whether a place lasts. Most communities run on some form of consensus Consensus A decision method requiring the agreement of all participants. Powerful for trust, slow under scale and fatigue. or consent Consent A decision passes when no one has a reasoned, paramount objection. Not the same as everyone thinking it is the best idea., and the difference matters more than newcomers expect: consensus asks everyone to agree, consent asks whether anyone has a reasoned objection. The first is warmer and, past a certain size, hands a quiet veto to whoever is most persistent.

What predicts trouble is not which method a group picked. It is whether the method is written down, whether anyone can name who decides what, and whether there is a way to change the rules that everybody already agreed to before they needed it.

Money, and what joining costs

There is no standard answer, and this hub publishes no figures — the only aggregate cost data we could find is twenty self-selected American communities, and nothing at all for Europe. What is worth knowing is the shape: in most forms entry is an ordinary local property price, because you are buying a home and competing with everyone else in that town for it.

What matters more than the number is what the money buys: equity you can sell, a right to live somewhere you never own, or a refundable deposit whose terms nobody wrote down.

The question worth asking before any of it: what happens to that money if I leave? A community that has not answered it in writing has not answered it at all.

What daily life is like

Less dramatic than people expect. Shared meals a few times a week, a work commitment measured in hours, more meetings than you would like, and neighbours who notice when you are struggling. The gains people report are consistent — children with a dozen trusted adults, old age that is not spent alone, and the ordinary relief of not owning your own ladder.

The costs are consistent too: less privacy, slower decisions, and conflict you cannot avoid by moving away from it.

What breaks them

Rarely the thing people expect. Not usually money and almost never the composting. Communities break on unexamined power, on conflict nobody was willing to name, on founders who could not let go, and on rules that were never written down and so could never be changed.

These patterns repeat closely enough to be written down and tested for. The RCOS stress tests do exactly that — around twenty documented failure modes, each with the conditions that produce it and what a community would have to have in place to survive it. Founder capture, invisible care labour, the privatisation of commons, emergency measures that quietly become permanent: if you are assessing a place, they are a more useful checklist than any list of green credentials.

Sources & further reading

1. 1 Foundation for Intentional Community — directory and definitions
2. 2 Global Ecovillage Network — ecovillage framing and network
3. 3 RCOS Core v0.1 — the standard behind this hub
4. 4 RCOS stress tests — documented failure modes, with pass and fail criteria

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