An intentional community is a voluntary
residential community
A residential community is a community, usually a small town or city, that is composed mostly of residents, as opposed to commercial businesses and/or industrial facilities, all three of which are considered to be the three main types of oc ...
which is designed to have a high degree of
social cohesion
Group cohesiveness (also called group cohesion and social cohesion) arises when bonds link members of a social group to one another and to the group as a whole. Although cohesion is a multi-faceted process, it can be broken down into four main c ...
and
teamwork
Teamwork is the collaborative effort of a group to achieve a common goal or to complete a task in the most effective and efficient way. This concept is seen within the greater framework of a team, which is a group of interdependent individu ...
from the start.
The members of an intentional community typically hold a common
social
Social organisms, including human(s), live collectively in interacting populations. This interaction is considered social whether they are aware of it or not, and whether the exchange is voluntary or not.
Etymology
The word "social" derives from ...
,
political
Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studi ...
,
religious
Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, ...
, or
spiritual vision, and typically share responsibilities and property. This way of life is sometimes characterized as an "
alternative lifestyle". Intentional communities can be seen as
social experiment
A social experiment is a type of psychological or sociological research for testing people's reactions to certain situations or events. The experiment depends on a particular social approach where the main source of information is the point of v ...
s or communal experiments.
[ The multitude of intentional communities includes collective households, cohousing comm]