Eco-communities: surviving well together

This book critically explores the aims and practices of worldwide eco-communities.

Eco-communities can inspire, provoke, and challenge us to live more environmentally harmonious and collective lives. They are practical, ongoing experimentations in how we might survive well together – humans and all living beings on this planet. Eco-communities are examples of grassroot efforts at socio-ecological transformation – self-organised practices, infrastructures and spaces that seek to transform ways of being, living and working. This book answers four critical questions: Can eco-communities generate socio-ecological transformations, and if so how and in what form?; Who lives in eco-communities and what are the implications of this demographic composition?; What does it entail to organise via collective governance practices?; and how do eco-communities operate financially and generate money and livelihoods? While many eco-communities attempt to transform all elements of their daily lives (a holistic and interconnected reworking of how we dwell, eat, work, educate, reproduce, age, etc.) these processes as always incomplete, in-the-making, unfinished and messy. This book explores the ongoing processes of navigating these tensions and contradictions that none-the-less create hope that we might be able to live otherwise and be involved in world-making projects.