Resilient utopias

Utopian thinking has intersected with the practicalities of community-building for thousands of years, with today???s ecovillages being one recent expression of this nexus. Many utopian or ???intentional??? communities founded in the aftermath of World War 2 are now over 50 years old and have demonstrated a capacity to survive numerous disturbances in that time whilst retaining their essential function, identity, and sense of common purpose. Such communities provide an opportunity to better understand which factors impact on community resilience from a social-ecological perspective, as well as illuminating the relationships between utopian thinking and resilience building in complex adaptive systems. In this paper we present a case study of Auroville, India, and aim to identify the factors that have enabled the community???s resilience over the past five decades. Results are presented from a series of semi -structured interviews with key stakeholders involved in management roles at Auroville and used to propose a model for community resilience at Auroville. The interview results confirm the broad applicability of the general resilience factors identified by previous researchers, especially the roles played by diversity, reserves, openness, modularity, nestedness, self-organization, and communication. The results also suggest other, more specific, factors have played a role in the social-ecological resilience of Auroville over time, including unity of purpose, creative mindset, and spiritual capital.