Intentional Housing Communities Forum

The intentional housing communities movement in the UK is small, but long-standing and well established. It incorporates communal living in a single house through to larger scale co-housing projects. There is a significant overlap with the co-operative movement, though intentional communities exist using various models across all housing tenures.

Many of these existing communities are centred around a common theme, such as permaculture/organic farming, low energy use/carbon footprint, veganism, social change work, providing housing for those with special needs, or a religious or spiritual focus. With some others, the forces that bind the community together remain elusive, but it is nevertheless apparent that they are there. There is a roughly equal mix of urban and rural-based communities.

The term "intentional community" has been the source of some confusion; it was coined in order to include all the various types and flavours of housing co-ops, communes, co-housing projects, and the like. There is a discussion of the definition of the term on the Diggers and Dreamers Wiki

Upon seeing the term used elsewhere with a different context, I additionally inserted the word "housing" to reduce ambiguity.

Generally speaking an intentional housing community is any building or project which houses people who make a conscious choice to live in anything other than the traditional single person or nuclear family manner.