Intentional community

• 1. Introduction

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  Intentional communities are places where people choose, deliberately and voluntarily, to build a shared life together. The idea sounds simple, but the reality spans thousands of years, dozens of countries, and wildly different visions of what a good society looks like. How did humans come to design entire communities from scratch? What drives someone to leave ordinary housing behind and commit to a collective existence? And what separates the experiments that endure from those that collapse?

  Ashrams are likely the earliest known examples, with roots stretching back to around 1500 BCE. Buddhist monasteries followed around 500 BCE. Around 525 BCE, the philosopher Pythagoras founded an intellectual, vegetarian commune in southern Italy. For the last three hundred years, hundreds of utopian communities have been formed across Europe, North America, South America, Australia, and New Zealand. The movement has never stopped. Today, communities like East Wind Community carry that tradition into the present. What these places share, and where they diverge, is the story this documentary will trace.

• 2. Defining the Experiment

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  The sheer number of terms attached to intentional communities reveals how contested the idea has always been. Cooperative community, withdrawn community, communitarian experiment, practical utopia, utopian society, socialist colony: each label carries its own political charge. The term "utopian community" is sometimes considered pejorative, and many communities actively reject it. The word "commune" fares no better in some circles, where it carries associations with leftist politics or the hippie era.

  Scholars have tried repeatedly to pin down a precise definition. In 1986, B. Shenker described an intentional community as "a relatively small group of people who have created a whole way of life for the attainment of a certain set of goals." Three years later, D. E. Pitzer added the element of partial isolation, defining them as small, voluntary social units whose members share an economic union and lifestyle in pursuit of ideological, religious, political, or educational ideals. By 1996, G. Kozeny emphasized the flexibility of setting: the community, he wrote, might occupy rural land, a suburban home, or an urban neighborhood. W. J. Metcalf, writing in 2004, set a concrete floor, requiring five or more people drawn from more than one family, united by what he called a "we-consciousness" that sets them apart from the broader society. That phrase, "we-consciousness," captures something the definitions often miss: it is not just shared housing, but a shared sense of being a distinct group with a distinct purpose.

• 3. Varieties of Community

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  The 1995 edition of the Communities Directory, published by the Fellowship for Intentional Community, offered a statistical snapshot of the landscape at that moment. Fifty-four percent of communities that chose to list themselves were rural, 28 percent were urban, and 10 percent maintained both rural and urban sites. That diversity in geography reflects a much deeper diversity in purpose.

  Benjamin Zablocki sorted intentional communities into more than a dozen categories: academic communities, alternative-family communities, coliving communities, cooperative communities, countercultural communities (including those rooted in the counterculture of the 1960s), egalitarian communities, experimental communities, political communities, psychological communities based on mystical or gestalt principles, rehabilitational communities, religious communities, and spiritual communities. Christian intentional communities, for example, look to the biblical book of Acts and the Sermon on the Mount as blueprints, striving to practice compassion and hospitality in a corporate context. Communities such as the Simple Way, the Bruderhof, and Rutba House fall into this tradition. Despite strict membership criteria, these communities generally remain open to visitors. Egalitarian communities operate on a different axis, emphasizing equal access to resources and decision-making as their core commitment. The governance data reflects this variety: 64 percent of intentional communities use some form of democratic decision-making, while 9 percent operate under hierarchical or authoritarian structures, and 11 percent combine the two.

• 4. The Commune as Ideal

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  John Goodwyn Barmby, a Suffolk-born radical who lived from 1820 to 1881 and later became a Unitarian minister, coined the English word for commune in 1840. His invention of the term anticipated a long debate about what communes specifically are, as distinct from intentional communities more broadly.

  At the start of the 1970s, author Ron E. Roberts placed communes within a larger category of utopias and identified three defining characteristics. First, egalitarianism: communes rejected hierarchy and graduations of social status as unnecessary. Second, human scale: members believed that industrial-scale society was inherently unsympathetic to human dimensions. Third, communes were consciously anti-bureaucratic. Twenty-five years later, Dr. Bill Metcalf refined this picture in his book Shared Visions, Shared Lives, describing communes by their emphasis on the group over the nuclear family, a common purse, a collective household, and group decision-making that extended into intimate affairs. The Fellowship for Intentional Community adds one further criterion: 100% income sharing. By that strict measure, the Fellowship's online directory listed 222 communes worldwide as of the 28th of January 2019. Among them were religious institutions such as abbeys and monasteries, and communities rooted in anthroposophic philosophy, including the Camphill villages, which support adults and children with developmental disabilities, mental health challenges, and other special needs.

  The ideal of the commune as an enlarged family is well documented. Benjamin Zablocki, however, noted in his writing on hippie communes that tensions frequently arose between founding members and new arrivals, with media publicity, sexual jealousies, and shifts in leadership among the recurring sources of strain.

• 5. Hippie Communes and Countercultural Refuge

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  Kaliflower, a utopian living cooperative founded in San Francisco in 1967, played a significant role in the hippie movement. Its founding values were free love and anti-capitalism. Two other prominent communes in northern California at the time were Wheeler's Ranch and Morning Star Ranch.

  Damon R. Bach's book The American Counterculture: A History of Hippies and Cultural Dissidents describes hippie communes as marked by deviation from majority society in, as he puts it, "every conceivable way." Communes served as a refuge from consumerism, restrictive social norms, and the military draft. Morgan Shipley, writing in "Hippies and the Mystic Way," argues that by refusing to engage in political debates, including those common among New Leftists within the hippie subculture, hippies were able to build systems of communal responsibility that placed mystical experience above all else. Gilbert Zicklin's 1983 book Countercultural Communes: A Sociological Perspective noted that the majority of American hippie commune residents were white and upper-middle class. Bach adds that minorities and low-income individuals were often hesitant to join, unlikely to accept voluntary poverty on the same terms. Writing in 2006, Andrew Jacobs observed that after decades of contraction, the American commune movement had been expanding since the mid-1990s, driven by communities that sought to combine the utopian spirit of the 1960s with American preferences for privacy and property ownership. Twin Oaks, founded in 1967, is cited as a rare example of a non-religious commune that has survived longer than 30 years.

• 6. Communities Across Countries

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  In Ireland in 1831, John Vandeleur, a landlord, established a commune on his Ralahine Estate at Newmarket-on-Fergus in County Clare. He asked Edward Thomas Craig, an English socialist, to write its rules and regulations. The founding population consisted of 22 adult single men, 7 married couples, 5 single women, 4 orphan boys, and 5 children under the age of 9. No money circulated inside the commune; only credit notes could be used in the commune shop. All residents were required to abstain from alcohol, tobacco, snuff, and gambling, and to work 12 hours a day in summer and from dawn to dusk in winter. The experiment prospered for a time, and 29 new members joined. In 1833, it collapsed because of John Vandeleur's gambling debts. On the 23rd of November 1833, the members met for the last time and recorded a declaration of "the contentment, peace and happiness they had experienced for two years under the arrangements introduced by Mr. Vandeleur and Mr. Craig."

  In Canada, the Children of Peace, an Ontario Quaker sect, operated a utopian farm settlement at Hope, now Sharon, in East Gwillimbury from 1812 to 1889. Other settlements followed Owenite, Tolstoyan, Doukhobor, and Hutterite principles. In Germany, the first wave of utopian communities arrived between 1890 and 1930, during rapid urbanization, with at least around 100 known communities pursuing nudism, vegetarian agriculture, anarchism, socialism, and other ideologies. The 1960s brought a second wave, beginning with Kommune 1 in Berlin. In South Africa, the town of Orania was founded in 1991 as an Afrikaner-only settlement; by 2022 its population had reached 2,500, representing a 55% increase from 2018. In Mexico, the site of Topolobampo hosted a utopian colony from 1886 to 1893, with U.S. author Marie Howland and Canadian book publisher John W. Lovell among its prominent figures.

  In Australia, one of the oldest continuously running communities is Moora Moora Co-operative Community, home to about 47 members as of October 2021. Located atop Mount Toolebewong, 65 kilometres east of Melbourne at an altitude of 600-800 metres, it has operated entirely off the electricity grid since its founding in 1974, with founding members Peter and Sandra Cock still in residence.

• 7. Russia and the Tolstoyan Thread

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  In imperial Russia, most peasants held land in communal ownership within a mir community, a structure that functioned simultaneously as village government and cooperative. After the revolutions of 1917, Tolstoyan communities multiplied rapidly across Russia, drawing on Leo Tolstoy's teachings about nonviolence and communal life. The Soviet state eventually dismantled them. Collectivisation and ideological purges in the late 1920s wiped out or stripped the independence of these communities. Some colonies, including the Life and Labor Commune, relocated to Siberia to avoid liquidation. Several Tolstoyan leaders, among them Yakov Dragunovsky, who lived from 1886 to 1937, were put on trial and sent to the Gulag. Some Tolstoyans emigrated to Canada to continue their experiment elsewhere, carrying the tradition to a very different soil.

• 8. Endurance and Reinvention

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  Koinonia Farm in the United States was established in 1942. The Bruderhof arrived in the US in 1954. Twin Oaks followed in 1967. Although many American communes are short-lived, some of these have now operated for more than 50 years, outlasting the political and cultural movements that originally inspired them.

  The Fellowship for Intentional Community remains one of the main sources of listings and information about intentional communities in the United States. In Scotland, the Findhorn Foundation, founded by Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean in 1962, now houses more than 400 people at its sites in Moray and at Cluny Hill in Forres. In Wales, the Lammas Ecovillage near Crymych in Pembrokeshire received planning permission from the Welsh Government in 2009 and has since created 9 holdings with a central communal hub. The network of political communes in Germany, called Kommuja, counted about 40 member groups as of May 2023. Each of these points toward the same underlying pattern: the impulse to build a deliberate community does not fade, and the forms it takes keep shifting to meet the conditions of the age that produces them.