INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES IN RURAL SPACES

In this paper, we focus on intentional communities in the Western world. These communities consist of a variety of groups, with different characteristics, ideologies and motivations. Examples are eco-villages, religious communities and communities of lesbians. These groups intend, at least to some extent, to withdraw from mainstream urban society, challenging norms of urban life, e.g. wasteful behaviour, stressful lives or heterosexual stereotypes, and create their own places in rural areas. Key questions that we seek to address in the paper are: What types of intentional communities can be identified? To what extent are intentional communities withdrawn from the rural areas in which they are established? We attempt to answer these through discussing the results of a survey among 496 communities. Furthermore, we describe an example of the ecological type of community, since these communities are most explicitly challenging urban norms and values. Copyright (c) 2007 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.

The Design of Intentional Communities: A Recycled Perspective on Sustainable Neighborhoods

guide behavior analytic interpretations of non-behavior analytic research on contemporary intentional communities, highlighting ways in which this research substantiates many of Skinner’s notions about reinforcement contingencies in a successful community. The article then considers intentional communities in light of more current behavioral theory, such as the notion of reconciling personal and collective contingencies and shifting the balance of resource-intensive, resource-light, and resourcefree reinforcers. This article goes on to suggest one new concept (i.e., macroshaping), along with concepts from outside the field (i.e., deliberative democracy, behavior setting theory) that may be useful in a behavioral approach to the design and analysis of intentional communities