- Heres some good definitions taken from one of the greatest book about creating eco-villages and intentional communities, CREATING A LIFE TOGETHER, BY DIANA LEAFE CHRISTIAN
What Are Intentional Communities and Ecovillages?
A residential or land-based intentional community is a group of people who have chosen to live with or near enough to each other to carry out their shared lifestyle or common purpose together. Families living in a cohousing communities in the city, students living in student housing cooperatives near universities, and sustainability advocates living in rural back-to-the-land homesteads
are all members of intentional communities.
Community is not just about living together, but about the reasons for doing so.
“A group of people who have chosen to live together with a common purpose, working
cooperatively to create a lifestyle that reflects their shared core values,”
-Fellowship for Intentional Community
What most communities have in common is idealism: they’re founded on a vision of living a better way, whether community members literally live together in shared group houses, or live near each other as neighbors. A community’s ideals usually arise from something its members see as lacking or missing in the wider culture.
Ecovillages are intentional communities that aspire to create a more humane and sustainable way of life. One widely quoted definition defines ecovillages as
“human-scale, full-featured settlements in which human activities are harmlessly
integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of healthy human
development, and which can be successfully continued into the indefinite future”
-Robert and Diane Gilman
An intentional community aspiring to become an ecovillage attempts to have a population small enough that everyone knows each other and can influence the outcome of community decisions. It hopes to provide housing, work opportunities, and social and spiritual opportunities on-site, creating as self-sufficient a community as possible.Typically, an ecovillage builds ecologically sustainable housing, grows much of its own organic food, recycles its waste products harmlessly, and, as much as possible, generates its own off-grid power.
Also...
A eco-village starts inside people, it is a relation you have to learn to establish with
yourself and to get conscious on your connection to the things around you.
It is about living together, cohabiting with the people that are here, the one
who come and go, and with the environment, plants and animals
-Felipe, eco-village Karaguata
Eco-villages are intentional communities with the goal of the harmless integration
of human activities into the environment in a way that support healthy human
development in physical, emotional, mental and spiritual ways.
Van schyndel Kasper 2008
A community is an ecovillage if it specifies an ecovillage mission, such as in its
organizational documents, community agreements, or membership
guidelines, and makes progress in that direction
-Global Eco-village Network