There is an accusation which has been flung over the decades (if not centuries) at practically every sort of intentional community-building effort, thus oddly discovering something which apparently entirely disparate elements of the right and left have in common. Sometimes that accusation takes the form of condemnations of a supposedly unrealistic idealism, sometimes in terms of contempt for what is labeled a nostalgic myopia. But either way, the heart of all these attacks is the same: attempting to build communities of cooperation, equality, and justice, in contrast to the socio-economic self-interestedness which has been the rule for 300 years or more, is "utopian," and thus nonsensical and wrong. The ease of that accusation, and the fact that it has been and still is unthinkingly lobbed at intentional communities of every sort, makes it worthy of push-back, I think.
The caveat which those who fling the accusation will insist upon, of course, is that it is not all community-building activities which they think deserves their condemnation and contempt; only "comprehensive" community-building. And for most critics, that's probably correct--it would require an insanely individualist outlook to describe every effort to strengthen neighborhood ties (organizing a block party!), to secure social justice (expanding handicap accessibility!), or to serve the public through the provision of common goods (health insurance, public schools, environmental protection, the Veterans Administration, and more!) as instances of "utopianism." (That some people do in fact affirm such a nihilistic libertarianism is worth noting but not much more. There are also people who make life-size nude sculptures of Richard Nixon out of butter, and more power to them.) The great majority of those who look askance upon community-building would insist that they do not mean to reject every communitarian project; rather, what they reject is community-building visions and efforts that aspire to comprehensiveness--or, on my reading, the ones that aspire to topography.
The danger which can--and, tragically, often does--accompany any effort to establish a complete community in accordance with specific intentions, whether religious or ideological or both, is well established, both historically and theoretically. The genocidal historical record of many comprehensive society-shaping visions is incontestable (though whether the kill-count of all such revolutionary movements is greater or fewer than the kill-count of non-comprehensive, profit-motivated world historical slaughters like the African slave trade or the European colonization of the Americas is something I leave to the terminally morbid to calculate). Theoretically as well, the problems with this conceptualization of humanity's fundamentally social and political nature are large, though not insurmountable. Humankind's embodiment as distinct individuals means an organic, evolving pluralism will always be present in all our social and political orders, and the rationalist temptation which is entailed by many communitarian visions directly contradicts that, with frequently destructive results.
But the emphasis there must be placed on "frequently," as opposed to "always." Human beings, despite (or perhaps as part of) our pluralism, regularly tend towards the dialogical and aspirational and spiritual, which means that what we truly are always reasoning about and reaching for--thanks to God or nature or both--is how to make our lives fit with that we consider to just and right and good: to achieve eudaimonia in our places, our topoi, and then make those places available to others. So while dangers and flaws of comprehensiveness must always be attended to, the topographical aspect of our spiritual and ideological longings is too central to the human character to dismiss it entirely. Indeed, if Wendell Berry is any guide, much of contemporary thinking reflects an overlearning (or an encouragement towards overlearning by those who benefit from our individualistic status quo) of the lessons of comprehensiveness. To automatically reject communitarian efforts and imaginings which involve the making of actual cooperative places as obviously pointless from the start is to succumb to a false sense of "inevitability...an economic and technological determinism, as heartless as it is ignorant" (Berry, The Art of Loading Brush, p. 51; more here).
So perhaps we can allow that the accusation of "utopianism" is not necessarily, or at least should not be accepted as necessarily, fatal to the communitarian imagination. But does that allowance have anything to do with localist projects, which, while obviously centrally concerned with places, rarely approach those topoi with any comprehensive vision in mind? While it is true that the watch-word for most genuinely localist politics today is "incremental," eschewing comprehensive reforms for the humble and the partial, there is, I think, a utopian element usually present nonetheless, hidden in the idea of "intentionality."
Every localist concern involves looking at a neighborhood, an association, or a community, and tending to it. That tending, however, unless wholly and unthinkingly reactionary (and if it were, then no communitarian tending would take place over the long haul at all, because to think outside of one's own immediate interest and one's own temporal moment is invariably aspirational), cannot help but involve an ideal, a vision--something that is intended. That intentionality, like comprehensiveness, can be dangerous is a simple sociological fact, but it is also that which grants community the transformative promise--whether personal or collective or both--which it has always held, separating us, as Aristotle observed, from otherwise equally "gregarious animals" like bees.
You don't need to work out the historical implications of such political theories to recognize the truth of that judgment, though--you could, instead, simply look at the real world example of dozens of intentional communities and communes and collective projects throughout history, and the mixed perspectives they embodied. You could look at the Bruderhof, an Amish-inspired movement of deeply traditional Christians, organized into communities of cooperation and equality around the world, whose communal devotion have led them to a political position of uncompromising pacifism. Or you could look at Koinonia Farm, an intentional community of believers in Georgia who humbly practice sustainable agriculture, but were also central to shaping, in the face of enormous racial hostility, the non-violent resistance which politically defined much of the civil rights movement in America.
"[T]he biggest reason the Perfectionists were able to maintain communal harmony despite such fraught circumstances was institutional: a form of weekly group therapy that they called 'mutual criticism'....[B]y the time the community relocated to Oneida, regular sessions of mutual criticism had become a central pillar of [what the followers of John Humphrey Noyce, the found of the community, called] Bible Communism....As the Perfectionists got better at mutual criticism, most of them came to regard it as a vital catharsis and an essential means of maintaining the colony's delicate social harmony. It functioned like a cross between confession, performance review, and psychoanalysis, but crowdsourced. The fact that everyone had a turn in the hot seat took some of the sting our of the ordeal....One man was cautioned that he had 'masculinity carried to excess. There is not enough woman in him'....Perhaps most important, the regular sessions of mutual criticism allowed the colonists to air the countless minor aggravations that will erode a cooperative colony from within if left to fester" (pp. 346-348).
It is probable that Jennings would not entirely agree with my likening of the practices of the comprehensive community-builders of the 19th century with those of today. In his view, while the revival of intentional efforts to create alternative forms of life over the past half-century is admirable--"[l]ike the nineteenth-century utopians, the long-haired communards of the sixties and seventies rejected the prevailing values of their day as morally corrupt and expressed that rejection through the total reconfiguration of their own daily lives"--their intentionality is of a lesser category entirely: "[a]lthough the communalists of the sixties and seventies tried (and often succeeded) to build strongholds of cooperation, pleasure, and consciousness amid the mercantile bustle of American life, they...expressed a secessionist impulse--a leave-taking from the World...[and thus their] revolution was more personal and, ultimately, far less utopian" (pp. 379-380). But I find this unfair, because it wrongly assumes that any envisioning of a place that isn't millenniarian--that is, that doesn't proclaim it to be a model for a world which teeters on the edge of total destruction and/or transformation--has no radicalism, no true utopianism, to it at all.
In a world where the pluralism of the human condition has been, for centuries, from the age of imperialism to that of industrialization and beyond, both subject to and expected to express itself through an ever-evolving, ever-varying, but nonetheless also ever-expanding, technologically-enabled socio-economic universalization, privatization, and individuation, it seems to me that any attempt to build into one's topos principles and practices that aspire to, or at least are in dialog with, ideals of social justice and civic strength and equality, cannot help but involve at least a degree of comprehensiveness, a degree to utopian hope. To quote the striving local socialists of the Solidarity Collective, "there are many potential models of anti-capitalist activism and politics," and the search for "cooperative, sustainable systems" will always be a matter of "good-faith deliberation."
Such deliberation--or "mutual criticism," for that matter--isn't a rejection of the possibility of building a locality of such comprehensive, communitarian "felicity" that others will be inspired and transformed by it, and thus go forward to build other such "eu-topian" communities in other places. (That is, in fact, exactly the primary aim of the Solidarity Collective: as they write, "We hope that by creating a thriving, fun, and engaged non-capitalist ecosystem we can demonstrate the viability of a more cooperative and less oppressive way of life and hence attract more people to our cause.") What it is, is a recognition that such places shouldn't be conceived as environments that will just rationally unfold, without particular work done by particular people in particular topoi. Thus, maybe, does incrementalism and utopianism meet. If you're looking intentionally at your locality, wanting to make it more just and more civil and more communal--with, say, cooperative food practices, responsible energy usage, democratic decision-making, and social arrangements premised upon love and respect rather than financial and racial advantage--well, that doesn't automatically make you into a communard, fully engaged in the struggle to build a comprehensively new world. But it does mean, I think, that you probably share more with those inspired folk than you may think.