This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Like many people, I developed some strange fixations during the pandemic. One week, I fell down an embarrassing rabbit hole of watching, and learning the rules of, sheepdog trials. It was all too easy to sentimentalize rural traditions while cocooned within my 16th-floor apartment.

Intentional communities offered a more enduring fascination. They’ve been described as voluntary living arrangements of at least five people from multiple families, with a sense of affinity outside of the mainstream, though not necessarily pooled income. For instance, one tiny community that I learned about was a 10-person household in rural Austria, made up of  permanent members and donation-based visitors, in a continuing battle for financial solvency and a critical mass of residents. Overall, it’s not hard to see why the pandemic drove my curiosity about intentional communities. Being cooped up at home naturally made me consider alternatives for a less isolated life. And the deliberate, carefully planned nature of intentional communities was alluring at a time when people had little choice over where and how they lived.

In contemporary Western culture it’s easy to romanticize communal lifestyles, just as it’s easy to mock them. Some proponents have sought to distance themselves from mockery or sensationalism through different branding. One reason many residents prefer the term “intentional community” is the departure from the baggage of “commune,” with its whiff of naïve, oversexed counterculture. However, terms can blur as boundaries do, within a communal home.

Given the grand dramatic potential of combustible relationships and politics in an enclosed space, it’s not surprising that some excellent novels have emerged with communal living at their center. Two of my favorites, Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam’s Arcadia and Joe Dunthorne’s Wild Abandon, follow young people grappling with the distance between their communities’ practices and those of the mainstream world, to both comic and moving effect.

But there’s also plenty of stellar nonfiction about intentional communities. This list focuses on the secular variety. The breadth of articles here hints at the diversity of living arrangements that all have one thing in common: people’s desire to live their ideals, in communion with others.

Why Communal Living Can Make Us Happier (Matilda Welin, BBC Culture, April 2024)

This article sifts through different kinds of contemporary communal living, from house shares to co-living. Welin focuses on people drawn to these setups for financial, environmental, or community-building purposes, rather than as utopian political projects. The interviewees explain that the benefits currently outweigh the drawbacks (which include a lack of quiet and some residents not pulling their weight). Their accounts suggest that living in an intentional community isn’t always an all-or-nothing decision, at least for those who don’t plug all their savings into a volatile housing situation. For some people, it’s the right choice for right now.

More people may be turning towards communal living because the housing market is so pressured, Clark says. Some seek it out because they want to be more environmentally sustainable. And of course, in today’s atomised society, where family members may be spread far and wide from the town where they were born, social connection is a big draw. In fact, research shows that people who live in intentional communities have a quality of life as high as the happiest people in society.

The Utopian Machine (Susanna Crossman, Aeon, September 2022)

In stark contrast, this is an unflinching autobiographical essay about Crossman’s upbringing in an English housing cooperative beginning in 1979. (Crossman has recently published a full memoir about her childhood.) Now a therapist, her adult perspective on her childhood experiences draws out tensions between utopian ideals and the basics of physical and psychological survival. For instance, Crossman refers to the Kids and the Adults as if they were different factions, in which individual needs were subsumed in pursuit of shared ideological goals. This was fine for the Adults, who had chosen this life, but potentially traumatic for the Kids, who were essentially left to fend for themselves. 

There was freedom, yes. But there was also, in the 60-room mansion of unlockable doors, abuse of children, hidden in plain sight. One of Crossman’s coping strategies was to build walls within herself, in the absence of boundaries in her home.

Slowly, I learn to adapt, to change my colours like a chameleon. It is necessary, for there is little movement between the interior and the exterior. Estranged from the outside world, I experience the dangers of power and group dynamics–victims and aggressors in confined spaces.

Why These Hong Kong Urbanites Are Farming (Kootyin Chow, SAPIENS, April 2023)

This account, by an anthropologist living in a Hong Kong ecovillage called PEACE, focuses on food. Chow describes the workaway details of the organic vegetables that she and her fellow PEACEniks grow, harvest, cook, and cherish as a means of connecting to the natural world—and to Hong Kong’s less urbanized past. Because the residents of this ecovillage live in separate houses, not all of them near the farmstead, this living arrangement is less intimate than in some other intentional communities. But there’s still a shared sense of purpose and physical belonging, tied to food as a vehicle for building community.

Come for the photos, stay for the yellow pickled turnip recipe.

In the last decade, however, Hong Kong has experienced a revival of farming—and PEACE is amid the forefront of these efforts. But the movement is about much more than just agricultural self-sufficiency. As I’ve learned from PEACE, working to build strong communities and create a more sustainable and resilient food system also offers hope for us in Hong Kong. We farm in the face of China’s tightening political and economic control and the ongoing global threats of climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss.

Through food, we’re helping to build a different kind of future.

Intentional Homeless Community in Berkeley (David Bacon, Street Spirit, March 2016)

Intentional communities are typically seen as the preserve of the middle class. Yet photojournalist David Bacon starts from the premise that a homeless encampment can also be a deliberately designed residential community. His interviews with residents of temporary encampments in Berkeley, California, draw out a long legacy of activism. In their community building and in their collective decision-making, these activists have sought to reshape their worlds in a similar manner to many members of intentional communities.

The article was published in 2016, but remains timely. It feels especially urgent in the wake of the controversial executive order, issued by California Governor Gavin Newsom in July 2024, to dismantle homeless encampments across the state.

Over the years, Berkeley, like most liberal communities, has been comfortable with the idea of the homeless being victims. But many Berkeley residents and business owners grow uneasy when homeless people organize and use the creative tactics of the labor and civil rights movements.

Last year, Berkeley’s homeless people did just that. They created what they called “intentional communities,” or “occupations,” like Liberty City and the post office camp, not just as a protest tactic, but also as places where they could gain more control over their lives and implement their own ideas for dealing with homelessness.

The Last Glimpses of California’s Vanishing Hippie Utopias (David Jacob Kramer, GQ, September 2021)

This is a very different take on some of California’s intentional communities. Kramer was drawn to this story by architecture: the self-built homes that cropped up in Northern California during the back-to-the-land movement of the ’60s and ’70s. Many of these structures are now crumbling, the communes depopulated. 

Kramer spoke with the stalwarts: people in their 70s and 80s who stayed long past the Summer of Love. There’s a paradox here, in that the interviewees seem like rugged individuals but also yearned for communities closer than was typical of conventional American society. This photo essay is part DIY porn, part history lesson, and part tribute to a dwindling lifestyle.

It was a grand social experiment, but the promise was often rosier than the reality. Most found the grind too hard going and the poverty too bleak, and within a few years returned to the city and more conventional lives. But a small number stuck it out for decades, long after the Summer of Love had dissipated, and a handful of them still live in communities scattered across Northern California. These flinty souls remain a study in principled self-reliance and human ingenuity, having supported themselves and their families for years through subsistence farming and sundry side hustles: ceramics, teaching, salmon fishing, instrument making, firewood hawking, and weed growing.

‘We Have Brothers, Sons, Lovers–But They Can’t Live Here!’ The Happy Home Shared by 26 Women (Anita Chaudhuri, The Guardian, August 2023)

New Ground, the UK’s first cohousing community solely for women over the age of 50, is a testament to endurance. It took 18 years to find the land, obtain planning permission, and finally establish the community. It’s also a testament to independence. The residents support each other as they age, though carers can still come in for those with additional needs.

A common criticism of intentional communities is that they’re homogeneous in terms of race and class. One reason it took so long to get New Ground off the ground was its commitment to financial inclusion, at least. Eight of the 25 apartments are reserved as below-market-rate rentals for people on low incomes. While the residents live in separate homes, they share communal spaces and manage the site by consensus.

All in all, it’s a different model of aging: one that’s feminist, autonomous yet social, and even joyful.

At New Ground, the women manage everything themselves and tasks are divided up among teams of volunteers responsible for maintenance, gardening, communications, cleaning and legal issues. For those who can’t see the need for the women-only model, Brenton cites the fitting tale of a Canadian project that decided to admit men “so there would be someone to change the lightbulbs”. “Within six months, every member of their management board was a man. This lot can change their own lightbulbs.”

Christine Ro is a journalist in London. Because of her varied interests, a critic once wrote of her, “She must be a conglomerate.” 

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands