It has occurred to me that “community vision” as a term is quite close to “shared hallucination.” This seems appropriate.

As a long time project manager and pessimist (more synonymous terms), the biggest reason I tend to immediately dismiss conspiracy theories is that most are based on the belief that a vast coordination of people toward a large goal has been successful. If in fact the moon landing was faked, I’d argue it still might be one of humanity’s greatest achievements, representing the successful production of a sophisticated product and ongoing cover-up without a single incident of someone letting slip to their buddies over beers about how much time was wasted in planning meetings. Coordination between more than ten people toward a unified long term goal will always be a winding road, unlikely to reach the destination envisioned at the start.

So, to think about cooperative community building in any kind of serious and realistic way, I think it has to be acknowledged up front that all ideas will morph, crumble, and emerge long after any individual person thinks we “have it right.” I can imagine no endeavor more fundamentally human than creating a community, and humans for all their potential brilliance are constantly changing.

With this said, I suppose you still have to start with something in mind, and luckily there are examples of intentional communities around the world in every flavor. Looking at these varied models, I’ve identified a few elements that seem important to what I would like to achieve:

• Cohousing: Defined as having independent living spaces for several parties that share certain rights and responsibilities with each other. For example, a compound of standalone, separately-owned homes with co-owned shared additional facilities like working and recreation spaces. Or, a building with semi-independent apartments sharing essential facilities like laundry and kitchen.
• Operational sustainability: While I don’t envision setting up the Independent Commonwealth of Place, I see it as important to prioritize a degree of self-sufficiency for the community. An intentional community should not overburden the surrounding communities, or rely continuously on outside resources. In the extreme, this might mean lean, off-grid living and and a diet of exclusively turnips – but this isn’t the level of independence I’m interested in unless Trump gets up to some truly dystopian nonsense. Instead, I think of a balanced, well-run business, where mindful investment in resilience creates some security against the unexpected. For intentional communities, the adverse events could be things like natural disasters, political and legal change, gain and loss of members, and other localized disruption. None of these can be fully protected against, but a model that, for example, prioritizes investing in a solar power backup is less likely to fall apart when local infrastructure starts to fail. A model that facilitates monetization of the community’s resources in some way can better weather sudden changes in operating cost.
• Local integration: Most intentional communities do not set up on remote, unsettled islands, but many try to operate as if they are. American expats carry a lot of cultural baggage into any new country, and when settling in a very different context we are at risk of both eroding the local culture and failing to connect with it successfully. Including people and ideas from the region in the design of a community strikes me as a challenging but rewarding principle.
• Healthy legal foundations: A clear framework for multiple members to understand their rights and responsibilities in the organization is necessary to protect and empower participants. This also means setting expectations for legal compliance in the region, and how the community is structured to adhere to legislation and norms.
• Starting small: I feel that a viable intentional community can’t be planned into existence – it needs to grow slowly. My main interest is in starting with property that supports 2-3 small families at the outset. I expect to need to figure out how to operate a property like this by myself initially as a set of vacation rental properties while other potential community members visit and consider the move. That means I could quite possibly just end up financing the whole place indefinitely and running it as a business if no community successfully forms. As such, I don’t want to overspend on initial acquisition, and need to be mindful of zoning and other requirements related to doing business on the property.
• Facilitate productive work: While I aspire to be a grumpy old retired lady soon enough, it’s important to me that a community is built for productivity – within reason. A community that has the resources and tools for small scale sustainability farming is good, but given my own background and lack of success with houseplants I tend to think more along the lines of technology. People should be able to do tech work remotely, using reliable facilities and infrastructure. The community should have tools available to help members build, create, repair, fabricate, and experiment. While I firmly believe work should not exclusively be about money, the need for funds is a reality a community should be designed to recognize.

With all those fundamentals, there’s still a lot missing from this concept. One particularly glaring one is how to assemble the members of an intentional community to share this vision/hallucination. The fact is, I’m not really sure how to do it. I’ve been extremely fortunate in my experiences living with strangers, particularly the cultural exchange students that lived with us over the course of 5 years. I interviewed dozens of people and in each round the one we chose to host just felt natural in the end. The agency encouraged us to set rules and curfews and such, but as we were hosting adults in their 20s I never wanted to try to “parent” them like that. Just as at work I much prefer to review hundreds of candidates for a job until I can hire the one I feel completely confident in, I don’t want to muck about trying to set rules to stand in for good judgement. But the power dynamic is different in a community – for everyone to be invested, everyone has to feel empowered. There’s a lot fewer guardrails when people with different ideas all wield considerable power to impact each other.

I mean, we all saw the 2024 election.