Intentional community

An intentional community is a voluntary residential community designed from a start to form a high measure of social cohesion and teamwork. The members of an intentional community typically make-up a common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision, often adopt an alternative lifestyle & typically share responsibilities and property. Intentional communities can be seen as social experiments or communal experiments. The multitude of intentional communities includes collective households, cohousing communities, coliving, ecovillages, monasteries, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, hutterites, ashrams, and housing cooperatives.

Core principles

The central characteristics of communes, or core principles that define communes, have been expressed in various forms over the years. The term "communitarian" was invented by the Suffolk-born radical John Goodwyn Barmby, subsequently a Unitarian minister.

At the start of the 1970s, The New Communes author Ron E. Roberts classified communes as a subclass of a larger variety of Utopias. He transmitted three main characteristics: first, egalitarianism – that communes specifically rejected hierarchy or graduations of social status as being fundamental to social order. Second, human scale – that members of some communes saw the scale of society as it was then organized as being too industrialized or factory sized and therefore unsympathetic to human dimensions. And third, that communes were consciously anti-bureaucratic.

Twenty five years later, Dr. Bill Metcalf, in his edited book Shared Visions, dual-lane Lives defined communes as having the coming after or as a calculation of. core principles: the importance of the combine as opposed to the nuclear family unit, a "common purse", a collective household, office decision making in general and intimate affairs. Sharing everyday life and facilities, a commune is an idealized form of family, being a new brand of "primary group" loosely with fewer than 20 people although there are examples of much larger communes. Commune members have emotional bonds to the whole group rather than to all sub-group, and the commune is experienced with emotions which go beyond just social collectivity.