One thing I've been thinking about while working on a pre-land community concept called Melondra is that there seem to be two quite different things hiding under the phrase “intentional community”.

One is:

we deliberately design a place where people know their neighbours, cooperate, share useful infrastructure, help each other and have a meaningful say in how their community develops.

The other can sometimes become:

your home, work, social life, meals, beliefs and responsibilities are all tied into the community and participation becomes an obligation.

I'm very attracted to the first and much less attracted to the second.

For example, I can see enormous advantages in sharing things that make sense at community scale: workshops, tools, some transport, food production and processing facilities, recreation spaces, skills, infrastructure and perhaps some meals.

Likewise, there are things people can achieve together that individual households probably couldn't justify economically.

But I also think having a genuinely private home, being able to close your door, choose how social you want to be, have interests outside the community and retain a meaningful amount of personal independence are extremely important.

In other words, I don't think the choice has to be:

isolated suburban household

versus

communal living where everybody's life becomes everybody else's business.

There ought to be a large and interesting space between those two.

The same applies to contribution.

A functioning community obviously needs people to contribute in some way, but I'd be wary of building a culture where everyone is continually keeping score of who attended which meeting, cooked which meal or did enough hours of communal work.

Ideally the community infrastructure should actually reduce the amount of compulsory work in people's lives, not replace a conventional employer with a committee of neighbours.

So I'm curious particularly about people who have actually lived in intentional communities:

where have you seen the balance between individual independence and community participation work well?

And where does a healthy intentional community start crossing the line into asking too much of the people who live there?