So another type of community I recently discovered is an agrihood or agrivillage. These are larger communities with lots of households, which encompass a farm or large community garden area for people to connect with. They’re a little less organized than most intentional communities, have more houses, but they try to design with sustainability in mind and have a focus on connection with the earth and neighbourhood involvement, many have a “community center” which is small so its more like a commonhouse. Regarding decision-making I don’t think its as connected as most communities are.
Have other folks heard about these or experienced them? What do you think? There’s one advertized here in the classifieds section, but all the other ones I’ve found in my research don’t seem to have a presence on ic.org and I’m surprised.
Well our first-time homebuyer counselor says it will be a goodly while before we can buy anything, our credit needs some serious work.
This means we’ll just stay in our apartment complex for the time being and not focus on community goals. Additionally I’ve discovered that I’m more in love with self-agency and autonomy than I realized and so I think we’re steering away from intentional community ideas. I do though want to work toward creating more community feelings where I’m at right now in our apartment complex. Making more community where I am instead of trying to get somewhere that already has it. And having it be more social-based instead of collaborative decision-making based (since our complex won’t let us make the decisions anyways :()
Will I ever come back to the idea of community? Maybe, in the form of an agrihood/agrivillage. It seems to be the model that works best for people who crave autonomy but want something a little closer than an average neighbourhood. Which is where we’re at right now in our vision of our future.