Alternative or Intentional? Towards a Definition of “Unusual” Communities

Cnaan, Ayala; Breyman, Steve

doi:10.1007/978-0-387-32933-8_16

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Utopias may take many forms, from Plato's philosophical imagining of an ideal state in The Republic to utopias that are purely literary, such as Aldous Huxley's Island, right through to lived communities such as Auroville. Where the terms "utopia" and "intentional community" overlap are in realworld communities in which groups of people collectively organize their lives around a shared purpose with a degree of separation from mainstream society (Sargent 1994, Kozeny 1995, Sargisson and Sargent 2004, Cnaan and Breyman 2007, Sager 2018). In such communities, utopian ideals interact with realworld challenges to produce a dynamic "utopian function" that is characterized by experimentation (Kapoor 2007, Sargent 2010, Clarence-Smith 2019.…”

Section: Background Intentional Communities and Utopiasmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Resilient utopias

Baumber¹,

Hunte²,

O'Neill³

et al. 2022

E&S

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Utopian thinking has intersected with the practicalities of community-building for thousands of years, with today's ecovillages being one recent expression of this nexus. Many utopian or "intentional" communities founded in the aftermath of World War 2 are now over 50 years old and have demonstrated a capacity to survive numerous disturbances in that time whilst retaining their essential function, identity, and sense of common purpose. Such communities provide an opportunity to better understand which factors impact on community resilience from a social-ecological perspective, as well as illuminating the relationships between utopian thinking and resilience building in complex adaptive systems. In this paper we present a case study of Auroville, India, and aim to identify the factors that have enabled the community's resilience over the past five decades. Results are presented from a series of semistructured interviews with key stakeholders involved in management roles at Auroville and used to propose a model for community resilience at Auroville. The interview results confirm the broad applicability of the general resilience factors identified by previous researchers, especially the roles played by diversity, reserves, openness, modularity, nestedness, self-organization, and communication. The results also suggest other, more specific, factors have played a role in the social-ecological resilience of Auroville over time, including unity of purpose, creative mindset, and spiritual capital.

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Section: Background Intentional Communities and Utopiasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The creation of a "Unity of Purpose" category that combines trust (Carpenter et al 2012) with equity (Cafer et al 2019, Suárez et al 2020) and the principles of shared vision, shared values, commitment, and responsibility that characterize intentional communities (Kozeny 1995, Cnaan and Breyman 2007, Sager 2018.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Resilient utopias

Baumber¹,

Hunte²,

O'Neill³

et al. 2022

E&S

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“…Such a community has common activities for its members and is usually located on one piece of land. ‘To consciously and willfully inhabit a particular space among like-minded people for a common purpose is to live intentionally’ (Cnaan and Breyman, 2007: 243). An intentional community is a group of people who have chosen to live together to achieve a common purpose, cooperatively trying to create and uphold a lifestyle reflecting their shared core values and ideas of the good society, and underlining their difference from the mainstream (Kozeny, 1995).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Planning by intentional communities: An understudied form of activist planning

Sager

2017

Planning Theory

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The article is about intentional communities choosing a lifestyle outside the mainstream. It is explained why their planning is a sort of activist planning and often a case of radical planning. Planning by intentional communities differs from most activist neighbourhood planning by closer relation to a deviating worldview or ideology. The permanent insistence on non-conformity makes planning processes involving both government and intentional community cases of agonist planning. Activist planning theory has not studied how the thousands of dedicated activists living in intentional communities plan the development of their area. The article starts such an investigation by studying Svartlamon in Trondheim, Norway. It is an urban intentional community for social change, housing some 240 individuals. The activists have used planning strategically to mobilize and build external support, to frame the cooperation with the municipality, and to establish a legal underpinning of the intentional community. The following questions are answered: Are the goals of the activists clearly reflected in the plans? How are the activists involved in the planning? Are the planning ideas of the intentional community well received by the municipality?

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