Are Intentional Communities the Way Forward?

“The reason I’m here is not because it’s a comfortable, beautiful, lovely place to live — which it is — but because it is, for me, an act of prefiguration. That means [to] live now what you want to see in the future, build what you’re working for post-revolution into the act of revolution and into all of your actions,” he says. “When that system crumbles and falls apart, [it’s about making sure] there is an alternative for people to go to.”

“Living Laboratories”

Futterman sees intentional communities as sites of “utopian experimentation,” which Kanney affirms. Kanney refers to intentional communities as “living laboratories.”

“Intentional community is, by definition, living with a group of people on shared land or housing and doing so intentionally, so that you’re writing agreements, have a governance system, and structuring it,” she says. Still, intentional communities can take a vast array of forms.

You might be most familiar with this concept through the hippie communes of the 1960s and 70s, but that’s not the only model for these groups, nor the first. According to Community Finders, the first intentional community in recorded history was Homakoeion, a vegetarian group that formed in 525 BCE. Now, intentional communities may be nestled in the woods like Sirius, or may form in bustling city centers. Intentional communities might require residents to share their income, or have residents make their own money. Some may function largely off-grid while others very much rely on city services…