ABSTRACT
College students share a purpose: to obtain a degree and enhance their capacity for meaningful lives. Their college experience may be transformative in ways beyond academics by nurturing community, increasing self-reliance and supporting a healthy lifestyle. Urban colleges in the US, with an enrollment of over five million students, should plan and design with the social and emotional impacts of their students in mind. Intentional communities, such as ecovillages, are found in rural and urban settings around the world and are designed to increase social cohesion. Urban colleges can use examples from these communities to bolster the cohesion of students’ experience using intimate-scaled spaces and practices. This chapter offers architectural insights from an ecovillage in Scotland, the Findhorn Foundation.
