Cases

People have lived together at Findhorn since 1962. The work of rebuilding the place ecologically began in earnest with the 1982 conference Building a Planetary Village, and eco-houses, a wind turbine and a biological waste water system followed one by one.

An independent study concluded that residents here have a smaller ecological footprint than any community measured in the industrialised world, and half the UK average. UN-Habitat named it a best practice twice, in 1998 and 2018.

The first international ecovillage conference, held here in 1995, gave birth to the Global Ecovillage Network.

The village also admits its own contradiction: much of its income came from course participants who arrived by plane, and those flights were never in the count. It is now moving its livelihood closer to home.

Auroville was inaugurated on 28 February 1968. It was founded by Mirra Alfassa and designed by the architect Roger Anger, and youth representing 124 nations took part in the opening.

More than 3,300 people from some 60 countries live there now. At the centre stands the Matrimandir, a spherical building for meditation, with housing, workplaces and forest spreading around it.

What makes Auroville unusual is not its size but its order of operations. The shape of the town was drawn first, and the last fifty years have been spent filling it in.

Opened in 1987, Crystal Waters was the first intentional village designed on permaculture principles. Of its 640 acres only 83 one-acre lots are residential; the rest of the land is held in common.

It was a finalist for the World Habitat Awards in 1996 and entered the United Nations' World's Best Practices database in 1998. More than 250 people live there today.

The village decided to keep no cats or dogs. Because of that it has become a wildlife sanctuary where kangaroos, wallabies and a great many birds and reptiles share the same ground as the people.

An idea that started in Heidelberg in 1989 spent years looking for land before settling on an old farmstead near Poppau in 1997. The site now covers 115 hectares.

Most of the houses are built of straw bales. In 2004, once straw had been approved as a building material, the first two-storey straw-bale house went up.

In 2005 a three-storey building followed, 500 square metres housing about twenty people — at the time the first of that size in Europe.

Residents earn their own living, but the land and the infrastructure belong to a settlement co-operative that every adult joins by taking eleven shares.

Solidarity farming grows about 75 per cent of the village's vegetables and fruit, and the toilets have been urine-separating composting toilets from the beginning.

Seventy-five adults and fifteen children live on 350 acres of rural Virginia. The original inspiration in 1967 was Skinner's novel Walden Two; it is now only one influence among many.

The heart of the place is income sharing. Rent and food are the group's responsibility, so no one has to earn those basics separately.

The time and money that frees up is deliberately allocated — hours spent on political activism count towards the weekly work quota.

Work is divided through a trust-based labour system in which all work is valued equally, which means the domestic chores usually not counted as 'real work' count exactly the same. It comes to about 45.5 hours a week.

Three people started it in 1997 on 280 acres of cheap prairie in northeast Missouri. About seventy people live there now.

Moving in means agreeing to six ecological covenants.

No personal motorised vehicles used or stored on the land; no fossil fuels for vehicles, space heating and cooling, refrigeration or hot water; organic standards for everything grown; electricity from sustainable sources; timber reused, regionally harvested or certified; and organics and recyclables reclaimed from the waste stream.

The land belongs to a non-profit land trust and residents lease from it. A residential leasehold is small — about 2,500 square feet per person — and costs around $25 a month.

There is no buy-in, so people without much money can come; and since the land cannot be resold, its price never climbs.

The project bought 67 acres of farmland beside the existing village of Cloughjordan in 2005, and the first residents moved in during December 2009. Because the new part joins the old, the shops, the school and the railway station are shared rather than rebuilt.

It has recorded the lowest ecological footprint ever measured in Ireland. Food is grown organically on the land, and the place is run democratically.

The village describes itself as a site of place-based education. Guided tours run on the first Sunday of every month at three o'clock, and schools and organisations stay to learn. Room for another 75 households is planned.

It began in 1978, when three people left their professions. In 1983 fifty of them ran a three-year social experiment in the Black Forest, and in 1995 they took the results to 335 acres in the Alentejo in south-west Portugal.

About 160 people live there today, calling the place a peace research village.

Its best-known work is the Water Retention Landscape: a decentralised way of holding rainwater in the shape of the land itself, rather than letting it run off, in country that is turning to desert. Reforestation and farming are built on top of it.

Tamera follows its own distinct ideas and communal norms, so it is not a model to copy wholesale. On the order in which land is brought back to life, though, there is plainly something to learn.

In 1971 Stephen Gaskin and 300 people from Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco settled in southern Tennessee. Nonviolence, respect for the earth and a vegan diet were the starting point.

American midwifery was revived here, and the modern home birth movement began from it.

Residents founded the relief and development organisation Plenty International, and the Swan Conservation Trust, which set aside a 1,358-acre preserve. Putting tofu, tempeh and soy milk on American tables was this village's work too.

Rapid growth broke both the infrastructure and the finances. A major restructuring in 1983, known as the Changeover, left a smaller, self-sustaining community; about 200 people now live on 1,750 acres held in trust.

Begun in 1991, it is now 100 homes and 210 residents — 170 adults and 40 children — on 170 acres. More than 80 per cent of the land stays green, 50 acres of it under a conservation easement.

The village is made of three cohousing neighbourhoods. FROG, the first cohousing project in New York State, was finished in 1997; SONG followed in 2006 and TREE in 2015.

Each was built differently, so what one neighbourhood learned shaped the next.

Cars are parked outside the neighbourhoods and the houses are joined by footpaths through the gardens.

Each neighbourhood's common house hosts shared meals two or three times a week, and residents put in two to four hours of community work a week. Decisions are made by consensus or dynamic governance.

Founded in 1994 on 329 forested acres southeast of Asheville, Earthaven is home to about 75 adults and 25 children spread across fourteen small neighbourhoods.

Earthaven does not share income. Each member is responsible for their own living, but the village is building an economy at its own scale: small ecological businesses on site, members hiring one another where they can, members investing in each other's homes and businesses.

The common land is owned by the homeowners' association and was financed by private loans from members.

Houses are built with earthen plaster and wood harvested on the land, designed for passive solar and powered by photovoltaics and a micro-hydro installation. Decisions are made by a modified consensus process.

It began in 1993 across two blocks at the north end of Wilshire Center/Koreatown and into East Hollywood in Los Angeles. Thirty to forty people use the streets and buildings that were already there while changing how they live in the city.

Residents run several organisations together: the Beverly-Vermont Community Land Trust, which takes housing out of the speculative market; the housing co-operative Urban Soil/Tierra Urbana; a revolving loan fund for ecological projects; and a time bank.

It is the exact opposite of buying rural land and starting from nothing. Here a village is not founded somewhere else — it starts where people already live.