“Glocalized” Utopia, Community-Building, and the Limits of Imagination

What happens when intentional communities break from lingering associations with socialism in favor of supposedly more savvy or self-conscious forms of utopianism? Attempts to grapple with globalizing neoliberalism, giving rise to “glocalized” utopia, highlight how ill-fitting the categorization of intentional communities as programmatic utopias is. Engagements with “everyday” utopianism in the face of an agency-and imagination-limiting globalizing neoliberalism suggest that in contemporary lived utopianism the everyday has become the program; contemporary utopianism in some North American intentional communities is defined by concerns for “raising consciousness” and “creating space”—efforts symbolic of the blending of programmatic and everyday utopianism. This article offers an ethnographic case study of this blended, glocalized form of utopianism, drawing on fieldwork to investigate how eco-villagers in the Yarrow Ecovillage make “everyday” life a site of self-conscious social reform. It then argues that glocalized utopia emerges when community aspirations for social reform confront neoliberal “recuperative capitalism.”