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Over the summer and fall of 2018, I spent time at nine of the lands and two women's-only music festivals and interviewed 39 women. This dissertation is the result of those interviews and my copious field notes. Chapter one frames the question of community sociologically and examines why the lands often remained homogenous even though their goal was that every woman was welcome to come visit and live. It contrasts the lands to women's-only music festivals, which often included diverse women. Chapter two shows how lands not designed to support old women slowly, and unintentionally, become retirement communities. Families of choice, often consisting of the other women living in the community, help the women who need extra assistance, but within limits set by an unaddressed ageism. The lands are at risk if they fail to attract younger members. Chapter three explores the mutual mistrust between the women's land members and the academic community that I found myself navigating as I completed this project. It details the compromises all feminist communities must make to sustain themselves, and explores how the tension caused by my participation in both the women's lands and academic feminist communities yielded insights into both. / Doctor of Philosophy / As part of the American second wave feminist movement, a new group of radical feminists emerged. Instead of trying to work within the system, as the feminists before them had done, they decided to create an alternative system as best they could. This dissertation project focuses on the current iteration of these lands; to do this research I spent time at nine of the lands and two women's-only music festivals and interviewed 39 women during the summer of 2018. Part of creating these alternative systems included buying land in rural spaces across the United States and setting up new communities not beholden to any current way of doing things. A major ethos of their communities was that all women were welcome, regardless of race, economic, class, dis/ability, or other identities. The first chapter examines how, despite the women's best intentions, these spaces were and continue to remain today, homogenous, and contrasts the lands with other feminist organizations and women's-only music festivals that were able to diversify. Chapter two explores how women are aging on the lands and the struggles the women are facing in attracting new members. The last chapter examines the mutual mistrust of me I found within both the feminist and academic communities, how I navigated that mistrust, and ultimately that mistrust offers insights into how both communities make compromises to sustain themselves.

The challenge of facilitating a shift towards sustainable housing, food and mobility has been taken up by diverse community-based initiatives ranging from "top-down" approaches in low-carbon municipalities to "bottom-up" approaches in intentional communities. This paper compares intervention measures in four case study areas belonging to these two types, focusing on their potential of re-configuring daily housing, food, and mobility practices. Taking up critics on dominant intervention framings of diffusing low-carbon technical innovations and changing individual behavior, we draw on social practice theory for the empirical analysis of four case studies. Framing interventions in relation to re-configuring daily practices, the paper reveals differences and weaknesses of current low-carbon measures of community-based initiatives in Germany and Austria. Low-carbon municipalities mainly focus on introducing technologies and offering additional infrastructure and information to promote low-carbon practices. They avoid interfering into residents¿ daily lives and do not restrict carbon-intensive practices. In contrast, intentional communities base their interventions on the collective creation of shared visions, decisions, and rules and thus provide social and material structures, which foster everyday low-carbon practices and discourage carbon-intensive ones. The paper discusses the relevance of organizational and governance structures for implementing different types of low-carbon measures and points to opportunities for broadening current policy strategies.

The local level has gained prominence in climate policy and governance in recent years as it is increasingly perceived as a privileged arena for policy experimentation and social and institutional innovation. However, the success of local climate governance in industrialized countries has been limited. One reason may be that local communities focus too much on strategies of technology-oriented ecological modernization and individual behavior change and too little on strategies that target unsustainable social practices and their embeddedness in complex socioeconomic patterns. In this paper we assess and compare the strategies of "low-carbon municipalities" (top-down initiatives) and those of "intentional communities" (bottom-up initiatives). We were interested to determine to what extent and in which ways each community type intervenes in social practices to curb carbon emissions and to explore the scope for further and deeper interventions on the local level. Using an analytical framework based on social practice theory we identify characteristic patterns of intervention for each community type. We find that low-carbon municipalities face difficulties in transforming carbon-intensive social practices. While offering some additional low-carbon choices, their ability to reduce carbon-intensive practices is very limited. Their focus on efficiency and individual choice shows little transformative potential. Intentional communities, by contrast, have more institutional and organizational options to intervene in the web of social practices. Finally, we explore to what extent low-carbon municipalities can learn from intentional communities and propose strategies of hybridization for policy innovation to combine the strengths of both models.

The thesis deals with cohousing; a concept of living based on common spaces and shared facilities. In the first phase, the aim is to provide a summary of the development of cohousing and other similar forms of housing in the world and also in Czechia. The second phase focuses on a concrete by cohousing inspired residential project located in the inner city of Prague. In the work it appears under the name Klidná. The second phase aims to find out what led the communication partners to choose Klidná as a new place of residence, how important role did the specific aspects based on cohousing played in the decision-making process and finally how are the ideas of this concept being fulfilled in everyday life of the inhabitants. The research is of a qualitative nature and the main method of data collection is realization of deep semi-structured interviews, which are subsequently evaluated on the basis of theoretical thematic analysis. Based on the study, none of the communication partners chose Klidná because of the concept of cohousing. They perceived the existence of common areas, small scale of the project or its spatial layout rather as a pleasant bonus. Fulfilling ideas of the concept in everyday life of the informants corresponds with the nature of the project and the context in which it was...

This project investigated the sustainability of homes within three intentional communities. Semi-structured interview and photographic walkthroughs examined the variability of architectural and technological approaches toward sustainability. These include: passive solar design, green roofs, radiant flooring, composting toilets, ground assist heat pumps, solar water heaters, multiamily units and modular construction. It was hypothesized that variation in sustainable construction is related to socioeconomic status and that economics would be a constraint. This project investigated whether communities were transmitting their practices to wider society, if individuals were copying vernacular architecture and if architectural practices followed individual beliefs regarding sustainability. It was found that the Internet is the main method of conveying these practices; that variability was tied less to individual beliefs than to the communities’ institutional documents; and that copying vernacular architecture was for aesthetics not sustainability. Intentional communities are good models for sustainable development, but knowledge transmission is limited.