Diggers and Dreamers: The Guide to Communal Living is a primary resource for information, issues, and ideas about intentional communities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - from urban co-ops to cohousing

Cohousing

A cohousing community is a type of intentional community composed of private homes supplemented by shared facilities. The community is planned, owned and managed by the residents – who also share activities which may include cooking, dining, child care, gardening, and governance of the...

 groups to rural communes

Commune (intentional community)

A commune is an intentional community of people living together, sharing common interests, property, possessions, resources, and, in some communes, work and income. In addition to the communal economy, consensus decision-making, non-hierarchical structures and ecological living have become...

 and low impact development

Low impact development

Low-impact development is a term used in the United States to describe a land planning and engineering design approach to managing stormwater runoff. LID emphasizes conservation and use of on-site natural features to protect water quality...

s.

History

Since 1989 Diggers and Dreamers has been the primary resource for information, issues, and ideas about intentional communities and communal living in the UK. The project was an off-shoot of the Communes Network, a loose organisation that was established at a meeting on 15-16 February 1975 organised by the Communes Movement, which itself was started in 1968 by Selene Community, and which had achieved a distribution of 3000 copies of its journal, Communes: Journal of the Communes Movement, in March 1971.

The bi-annual journal (and from 1999 accompanying website) focusses on all aspects of communal living. With articles covering practical "how-to-do-it" issues of community living as well as personal stories about forming new communities, decision-making, conflict resolution, raising children in community, and sustainability. Through the years there have been contributions from academics and writers studying communal living. Alongside the journal there has been a directory of communal groups.

The book now in its 10th edition has been variously described as "the communards bible", "...a fascinating insight into the world of communal living in Britain", and an "exiciting combination of journal and service publication".

Publisher

Diggers and Dreamers, available both in print and online, is published by Diggers & Dreamers Publications, which also publishes Utopia Britannica and Thinking About Cohousing. Editorial decisions are made by a small collective made up of around 4 or 5 members drawn from different communities around the UK who describe themselves as a "self-appointed-headless-elite-anarchist-editorial-collective with no office, elastic editorial policies, concertina finances and a can-do/why-not attitude problem."

Themes

Over the years the publication has covered a wide variety of topics connected with communal living and feature articles by both those living communally and those studying it. The themes covered by articles include:

• Decision-making
• Work
  Work
  Work may refer to:Human labor:* Employment* House work* Labor , measure of the work done by human beings* Manual labor, physical work done by people* Wage labor, in which a worker sells their labor and an employer buys it...
  
  
• Childcare
  Childcare
  Child care means caring for and supervising child/children usually from 0–13 years of age. In the United States child care is increasingly referred to as early childhood education due to the understanding of the impact of early experiences of the developing child...
  
  
• A day in the Life
• Income Pooling
• Developmental Communalism
• Sustainable Communal Living Around the Globe
• Developing Cohousing in the UK
• Why Feminism needs Utopianism
• The Value of Art in Commuity
• R&D for Utopia
  Utopia
  Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
  
  

External links

• Diggers & Dreamers
• Communities magazine
• Communities Directory
• Intentional Communities Wiki
• Intentional Communities Wiki page on Geoph Kozeny