Curious About…Communes.
I’m fascinated with communes - a couple of my colleagues here at IDEO grew up on them and one in particular always regales me with stories of his childhood - he grew up in a traveling theatre troupe (complete with the requisite bus) that communally moved across California and New Mexico and listening to him, it sounds like they were modern-day gypsies, their bodies painted bright colors, singing, dancing, cooking and eating together. While they might seem somewhat trapped in a timewarp with people smiling benevolently about their quaint hippie values, I am sure that the roots of these types of communities still have amazing relevance today.
Wikipedia describes a commune as: “an intentional community of people living together, sharing common interests, property, possessions, resources, and, in some communes, work and income. In addition to the communal economy, consensus decision-making, non-hierarchical structures and ecological living have become important core principles for many communes.” Many cultures naturally practice communal living (Kibbutzim in Israel, Mir communities in Russia and Kommuja in Germany are three notable examples) and wouldn’t designate their way of life as a planned ‘commune’ per se, though their living situation may have many characteristics of one.
There is a long history of communes in America that continues to this day. Andrew Jacobs of The New York Times wrote that: “After decades of contraction, the American commune movement has been expanding since the mid-1990s, spurred by the growth of settlements that seek to marry the utopian-minded commune of the 1960s with the American predilection for privacy and capital appreciation.”
The Twin Oaks Intentional Community in rural central Virgina has the tagline “100 People Sharing Our Lives.” Made up of 85 adults and about 15 children, their website states: “We do not have a group religion; our beliefs are diverse. We do not have a central leader; we govern ourselves by a form of democracy with responsibility shared among various managers, planners, and committees. We are self-supporting economically, and partly self-sufficient. We are income-sharing. Each member works 42 hours a week in the community’s business and domestic areas. Each member receives housing, food, healthcare, and personal spending money from the community.” Choosing to be politically active in diverse areas such as peace, ecology, antiracism and feminism, they openly host visitors and each year a collective Women’s Gathering and a Communities Conference where they welcome both experienced communitarians and seekers who are new to community living.
What Of It? I have to say: on paper, communes seem to make a lot of sense on a lot of levels. I’m not for a second suggesting that they are for everyone, but for a certain kind of person with a certain set of beliefs, they seem perfect. One of the projects we have done again and again at IDEO for various clients comes under the general title: “The Future of Community” and lot of modern day communes seem to embody the kind of values and design principles that would not seem out of place in one of our project final reports. Perhaps it’s more of a legacy branding issue - one man’s commune is simply another’s community, one man’s hippie values are simply another’s empathic, human-centered beliefs. Looking at the issues they are dealing with - environmental, family, economic and social systems, they are interestingly both quaintly nostalgic and decidedly forward-looking simultaneously. Their collective, participatory decision-making is something many of our clients are striving to achieve in their own organizations.
I Am Curious about shared value and belief systems, how they manifest as communities, spaces and ecosystems, how values from the past become both relevant and reinvented for today and about how once seemingly “fringe” things can become the possible mainstream at another time. Communes are to me, less about place and more about creating a collective mindset and philosophy.
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