ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses some utopian communities, reviews some concepts derived from social planning, and discusses briefly the place of the elderly in contemporary kibbutzim. The utopian imagination is probably as old as human thought itself and has always reflected the problems of the day. Thus, the design of ideal communities has engaged the creative energy of thinkers in every historic period. Interestingly, the role of the elderly in utopian communities has been quite varied. In some cases, a utopian community was designed without the specific intention of resolving problems of old age but later found itself inadvertently doing an excellent job of meeting older people’s needs. An example of a utopian plan in which older people were overrepresented is the Little Landers movement. A second example of a utopian community described by Hine, in which elderly people were overrepresented, was a racist colony called Holy City.
