Eco-communities: Inclusive, creative and self-provisioning approaches for an ecological urban future

Making our cities sustainable for an uncertain climatic future is a central focus of urban studies. Sustainable urbanism (also called eco-urbanism), experimental urbanism and postcolonial urbanism are all types of future urbanisms. Future urbanisms’ research, in different ways, examines what governance, infrastructures, materiality and social practices are required to radically transform urban spaces (Hodson and Marvin, 2010; Caprotti et al., 2015; Joss, 2015). There is also considerable research examining the processes of these transformations - the how of necessary social, political and economic change (Karvonen et al., 2018). Concurrently, but distinct from this research, is a growing body of work on eco-communities, intentional communities and utopian studies (Litfin, 2014; Jarvis, 2014; Sargisson, 2012). Eco-communities research is also examining how people are generating new ways of living, often through self-building, self-provisioning, and self-constructing off-grid infrastructures (Pickerill, 2015, 2016).