An intentional community is a group of people who have chosen to live together around shared values, a shared purpose, or a shared vision of how life should be lived. The word "intentional" is doing real work here: these aren't people who ended up as neighbours by accident. They picked each other, and they picked the way they want to live.
Intentional communities take many forms: rural ecovillages growing their own food, urban co-ops in converted buildings, religious communities built around spiritual practice, secular groups organised around sustainability or mutual aid. What they share is the deliberate choice to build something together.
The Definition, Plainly
An intentional community is a residential group that:
- Lives together, sharing land, a building, or a cluster of buildings
- Chose to do so. Membership is deliberate, not accidental
- Organises around shared values or purpose. There's a reason they're together beyond proximity
- Has some form of shared governance. Decisions about how the community works are made collectively
That last point is often overlooked. What separates an intentional community from a nice apartment building with friendly neighbours is that members have a say in how the community runs. The governance can be formal (consensus decision-making, rotating committees) or informal, but it exists.
Types of Intentional Communities
The category is broad. Here are the main types you'll encounter.
Ecovillages
Ecovillages are intentional communities built around ecological sustainability. They typically combine communal land, sustainable food production, low-impact building, and shared resources. Many are rural, though urban ecovillages exist too.
Well-known examples include Findhorn in Scotland, Earthaven in North Carolina, and Tamera in Portugal. The ecovillage movement is coordinated globally through the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN).
What defines an ecovillage isn't a fixed set of practices but an orientation: toward living more lightly on the earth, and doing so together.
Cohousing
Cohousing is an intentional community model where residents own or rent their own private homes but share significant communal space, typically a common house with a shared kitchen, dining room, and activity spaces.
Cohousing communities are typically smaller (15 to 40 households), pedestrian-friendly by design, and governed by the residents themselves. They're more common in Scandinavia and the US than elsewhere, though the model is spreading.
The key distinction from other intentional communities: cohousing residents have genuinely private homes. Community participation is voluntary rather than embedded in daily life. It's intentional community for people who want neighbours, not housemates.
Communes and Collective Households
Communes share more than common space. They typically share income, labour, and resources to some degree. Twin Oaks in Virginia is one of the longest-running examples: members contribute labour to the community and in return have their housing, food, healthcare, and basic needs provided.
Collective households are smaller, urban versions: a house where members share finances, chores, decision-making, and often meals. These range from informal friend groups who decided to live together intentionally to formally organised co-ops with membership processes and bylaws.
Religious and Spiritual Communities
Some of the oldest and most stable intentional communities are organised around spiritual or religious practice. Monasteries, ashrams, and intentional Christian communities have existed for centuries.
Contemporary spiritual intentional communities vary enormously: from contemplative monasteries where silence is the norm, to active retreat centres running year-round programming, to secular-spiritual communities that gather around practices like meditation or yoga without a specific religious framework.
The Monastic Academy (MAPLE) in Vermont, for example, blends Buddhist practice with leadership training and community living in a format that draws people from diverse backgrounds.
Co-ops (Housing Co-operatives)
Housing co-ops are member-owned residential buildings or complexes. Residents collectively own the building, share governance, and often share some communal spaces and activities.
Co-ops vary widely in how intentional they are in practice. Some are effectively private apartment ownership with collective governance but little day-to-day community life. Others, particularly student co-ops and worker co-ops, have strong cultures of shared meals, work parties, and collective decision-making.
Retreat and Residential Centres
Some intentional communities are organised primarily around hosting: running retreats, workshops, and residencies for visitors while maintaining a core resident community. The community and the programming are intertwined. Residents are often both practitioners and facilitators.
Plum Village in France, founded by Thich Nhat Hanh, is a large-scale example. Smaller retreat centres with resident communities exist across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.
What Living in an Intentional Community Is Actually Like
The gap between the idea of intentional community and the reality is real, and worth being honest about.
The good:
- A depth of connection that most conventional living arrangements don't produce. When you share meals, decisions, and daily life with people, relationships develop quickly.
- Practical mutual support: help with childcare, shared tools and resources, people around when something goes wrong.
- A sense of purpose beyond your own household. Being part of something larger than yourself, with others who share your values.
- For many people, lower cost of living. Shared resources, shared land, shared labour. Communities can provide a good quality of life at lower individual expense.
The harder parts:
- Conflict. Close living surfaces friction that more isolated arrangements let you avoid. Governance processes, shared finances, and collective decision-making are harder than they sound.
- Less privacy and autonomy. In communities with significant shared life, the boundary between your private life and community life can blur in ways that take adjustment.
- Founder dependency. Many intentional communities are held together by a charismatic founder. When the founder leaves or the vision shifts, communities face existential questions.
- The gap between the vision and the practice. Most communities are works in progress. The ones that last are honest about this.
How Intentional Communities Are Governed
This varies enormously, but most use some version of:
Consensus decision-making. The most common model. Major decisions require agreement (or at least non-objection) from all members. This is slow and sometimes frustrating, but produces decisions that everyone can live with.
Sociocracy / Holacracy. Structured consent-based systems that distribute authority into roles and circles. More scalable than pure consensus for larger communities.
Majority voting. Less common in intentional communities than in broader society, because decisions that create dissenters can fracture tight-knit groups.
Benevolent leadership. Some communities, particularly spiritual ones, have a recognised teacher or leader whose guidance shapes community direction. This works as long as the leadership is healthy. It's also the model most vulnerable to abuse.
What "Intentional" Actually Requires
Calling a living arrangement "intentional" means taking on a few things most people's housing doesn't ask of them:
Showing up for governance. Meetings, decisions, conflict resolution. In a well-run community, this is a few hours a month. In a poorly run one, it can consume everything.
Working through conflict directly. You can't just avoid your neighbours in an intentional community. Most communities develop norms, and often formal processes, for addressing interpersonal friction.
Contributing. Work parties, committee service, hosting visiting members. The community only works because members make it work.
Tolerating difference. You chose the community's values, but you didn't choose every person in it. Living closely with people who have different habits, communication styles, and life circumstances is the central practice of intentional community, and the central challenge.
How to Find an Intentional Community
Get clear on what you're looking for. Location, values, community type, level of commitment, duration. A rural ecovillage requiring 5 years and a work contribution is a different decision than an urban co-op with a 1-year lease.
Use a directory. Coliven lists intentional communities worldwide: ecovillages, cohousing, co-ops, retreat communities, and more. Each listing includes photos, community descriptions, membership types, and location.
Visit before committing. Almost every intentional community welcomes visitors, and most have formal visitor programmes or work-exchange arrangements. Spending a week is worth more than a month of research.
Ask the hard questions. How are decisions made? What happens when members have serious conflict? Has anyone left recently, and why? What's the financial arrangement? Communities that deflect these questions are telling you something.
Be realistic about commitment. Some communities require a substantial process before full membership: interviews, trial periods, financial contributions. This isn't gatekeeping for its own sake. It's how communities protect the thing they've built.
Intentional Community vs. Commune: What's the Difference?
The words are often used interchangeably, but there's a useful distinction.
A commune typically implies significant resource sharing: income pooling, collective ownership of property, shared labour systems. The original hippie communes of the 1960s and 70s fit this definition, as do contemporary examples like Twin Oaks.
An intentional community is the broader category. All communes are intentional communities. Not all intentional communities are communes. Many members own their own homes, maintain separate finances, and share only space and governance.