Student: Emily Tucciarone
Graduation date: May 2018
Type: Concentration (single major)
Date approved: November 2016
Go to concentration landing page
Summary
An intentional community is a group of individuals who share a like-minded goal, purpose, or set of ideals, and who use their planned living spaces to test or enact these shared ideals. This term is intentionally broad, and thus encompasses many types of groups; monasteries, communes, eco-villages, and squatter camps can all be considered intentional communities. For many of these groups, the use of physical space by a given community becomes an important reflection of the group’s values and ideals. The built environment of intentional communities may be essential to realizing their goals. A community’s identity and purpose can be strengthened by aligning the built environment with a group’s intentions. This idea may especially apply to intentional communities wishing to live in an environment that is different than built environments in mainstream society, which are often constructed as a way to “create an information system used to plan and control urban development” (Grigg 2010). By investigating the relationship between space and meaning, I seek to understand how values can define “space, time, environment, and place” and ultimately influence how built environments are constructed within and outside of intentional communities (Harvey 1996).
My choice to situate this concentration in the United States is due to the interesting history of urbanization in America. Due to a rich diversity in values and ideologies intrinsic to being a pluralist society, creating urbanized environments in the United States may be seen as an attempt “to define and structure urbanism in more than one way” in order to meet the needs of the great range of individuals inhabiting the country (Talen 2005). By looking at urban planning in the United States, it is evident how different American values which were considered important throughout different social and political contexts affected how built environments were constructed. For example, the rise of the suburb was the result, in part, of a baby boom which produced “a sudden surge in demand for family homes where young children could be raised” (Hall 2014). It will be interesting to explore the ways in which intentional communities differ from mainstream American built environments, given that both can be indicative of particular sets of values, expectations, and goals. Intentional communities in North America can be traced back to the early history of the United States such as the first colonial settlements of Williamsburg and Jamestown” (Talen 2005). Vast tracks of physical space available in early American history allowed North America to become a “fertile ground for the growth of communal living experiments in previous centuries” due to “geographically isolated niches” (Manzella 2010).
One concept that can be applied especially well in examining intentional communities is utopianism. The theory of utopianism is defined by the pursuit of forming the perfect society. Utopias, the societies formed within utopianism, are viewed as “a blueprint for a better or perfect world” and, on occasion, “the people who share these visions believe that they can and should be created in…the here- and-now” (Sargisson 2012). Realized visions of utopia may take the form of intentional communities who construct their space in a way that reflects the community’s view of a perfect, or better, society. Urban spaces constructed by mainstream society can also reflect principles of utopianism. The goals of urban planning can be a way to fulfill “the vision and the quest to achieve the best possible human settlement…operating within the context of certain established principles” (Besel 2013). By examining the pursuit of the perfect society through the framework of utopianism, I hope to observe how perceptions of the ideal society affect the construction of built environments.
One situated context to examine in the United States is Slab City, located in the Sonoran Desert of California. Slab City is a community of squatters known as “slabbers”. The community lacks running water and official sewage and electricity systems, yet still attracts additional residents in winter months known as “snowbirds”. Originally, the site was a military base known as Camp Dunlap, which was decommissioned in 1946. The military buildings were dismantled but large, concrete slabs were left behind. Interestingly, slabbers chose to incorporate the slabs into the built environment of Slab City, where they “remain a visible marker of the camp’s presence and its original layout” (Hof 2015). Given that there is no established system of land management, space is free to be used by anyone in the community. In recent years, slabbers have been pressured to integrate land ownership policies and have been under threat of having their land sold by the state (News Briefs) and have reacted with resistance. I am interested in how the lack of governance and land management contribute to both the identity of the community and to the built environment.
Investigating eco-villages, which are intentional communities focused on incorporating sustainable practices, would also be insightful. One such eco-village is found in Ithaca, New York. In contrast to Slab City, the Eco-Village at Ithaca, referred to as EVI, is highly organized. The community employs their own system of currency and screens individuals who seek to join. Particularly interesting is the use of cohousing, which can be described as “a compromise between the true commune and the modern suburb” (Manzella 2010). Despite utilizing built environments characteristic of suburban living, members of EVI distinguish themselves from mainstream society through their ideologies, which seek to encourage strong community and low-carbon footprints. I would like to examine how these values influence the built environment of EVI.
Some intentional communities are built upon religious ideologies. The Buddhist chapel at Wat Thai in Silicon Valley, California, is an example of a community formed around religion. With over 1,100 members and an average of 300 visitors on a typical weekend, the Wat Thai chapel has been successful in uniting Buddhist practitioners in the area. Built in 1996, the temple is a response to the lack of temples “constructed in the distinctive Buddhist architectural style” in the United States (Bao 2008). However, the desired appearance of the Thai chapel was limited by many local and federal regulations. “A height limit of thirty-five feet in a residential area” forced Thai architects to erect a roof that was shorter than traditional Thai chapel roofs which tend to be very tall (Bao 2008). In addition, the chapel was required to have public restrooms, which “is considered routine in the United States”, but for Thais, is considered to be taboo (Bao 2008). Buddhist practitioners seeking to create a culturally authentic space for themselves in the United States had to adhere to mainstream American building codes. This tension can be examined across intentional communities in order to understand how built environments are constructed even when community values are partially compromised by mainstream society.
For many intentional communities, planning and designing space is integral to the community’s values, and without doing so, “the modern dream to engineer a new society cannot be realized” (Miles 2008). I believe that this view can be applied on larger scale to urbanized spaces in general. By studying how built environments reflect the values and goals of intentional communities, we may be able to gain insight on how we construct our own.
Works Cited
Bao, Jiemin. “From Wandering to Wat: Creating a Thai Temple and Inventing New Space in the United States.” Amerasia Journal 34, no. 3 (2008): 1-18.
Besel, Karl, and Viviana Andreescu. Back to the Future: New Urbanism and the Rise of Neotraditionalism in Urban Planning. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2013.
Grigg, Neil S. 2010. “Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment.” In Infrastructure Finance, 37–64. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Hall, Peter. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design since 1880. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.
Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, nature, and the geography of difference. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
Hof, Andrew Op’t. “Slab City, California: Spatial Dynamics in an Off-Grid Community.” 2015, 1-129.
Manzella, Joseph. 2010. Common Purse, Uncommon Future : The Long, Strange Trip of Communes and Other Intentional Communities: The Long, Strange Trip of Communes and Other Intentional Communities. Santa Barbara, California. Praeger.
Miles, Malcolm. Urban Utopias: The Built and Social Architectures of Alternative Settlements. London: Routledge, 2008.
“NEWS BRIEFS.” Planning 80, no. 5 (May 2014): 7. Environment Complete, EBSCOhost
Sargisson, Lucy. Fool’s Gold?: Utopianism in the Twenty-First Century. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Talen, Emily. 2005. New Urbanism and American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures. New York: Routledge
Questions
- Descriptive: What are some intentional communities located in the United States? In what way are these intentional communities united by their values, if they are at all? How is space used in different intentional communities? How do intentional communities incorporate existing urbanized space within their own built environments? How is space used in mainstream American built environments?
- Explanatory: What motivates the creation of various intentional communities? In which cases, and how, does an intentional community’s built environment align with the community’s values and goals? How do different social and political contexts affect how built environments are constructed in America?
- Evaluative: How may the desired living spaces of intentional communities be in conflict with those in mainstream society? How must intentional communities compromise with American ideals of conceptualizing space?
- Instrumental: What can we learn by examining intentional communities who align their built environments with their values and goals? Can we see our own communities’ values and goals reflected in how we create built environments, and what does this tell us about planning for our future goals?
Concentration courses
- SOAN 305 (Environmental Sociology, 4 credits) spring 2017. Social discourses fueled by environmental situations will help inform my studies on inequality, social movements, and environmental sustainability, all of which may be tied to intentional communities in some way.
- ENVS 460 (Topics in Environmental Law & Policy, 4 credits) fall 2017. Will help create an insightful perspective on how law & policy affects land use, infrastructure, and community formation.
- ENVS 350 (Environmental Theory, 4 credits) spring 2018. Course breaks down environmental issues in order to examine the social, political, moral, and ethical mindsets intrinsic to them. Will be helpful in examining motivations of intentional communities.
- HIST 239 (Constructing the American Landscape, 4 credits) spring 2017. Useful in examining the social, political, economic, and aesthetic forces behind built environments. Will likely be applicable in examining how intentional communities are built.
- SOAN 222 (City And Society, 4 credits) spring 2017. Focus on how space is influenced by urban planning, different ideologies, and policies.
- ENVS 499 (Independent Study, 4 credits) fall 2017. Urban studies examining the historical conditions influencing urban design and planning. Will examine social, political, and economic motivations behind built environments across different contexts and time periods.
Arts and humanities courses
- HIST 261 (Global Environmental History, 4 credits). Pre-approved A&H course; no justification required.
- PHIL 215 (Philosophy and the Environment, 4 credits). Pre-approved A&H course; no justification required.