Co-Creating Eco-Communities in Diverse Places

Self-build, self-organised and collective attempts to provide homes and livelihoods are driving the growth of eco-communities worldwide. These intentional eco-communities are radically reconfiguring landscapes from farmland to permaculture gardens, off-grid homes and learning spaces. Such projects are putting into practice new forms of society-environment relations. They are building new forms of lived-in peopled landscapes that are new climate change resilient dynamic places where the inseparability of people and the environment is understood and practised. This lived environment disrupts conventional notions of nature in multiple and challenging ways. The environment is being reconfigured to accommodate the new socio-materialities of eco-communities and, in so doing, map out alternative environmental futures. At the same time places, in ways they have been known and loved by existing residents, are being altered and changed by these emerging eco-communities. Some of these changes are resisted and raise critical questions about who are involved in the co-creation of eco-communities and who are not, and who determines what the future of these places should be. The possibilities and implications of these disruptions and creations in diverse places are examined using empirical examples from recent research.