An intentional community is a voluntary residential community designed to foster a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork. Such communities typically promote shared values or beliefs, or pursue a common vision, which may be political, religious, utopian or spiritual, or are simply focused on the practical benefits of cooperation and mutual support. While some groups emphasise shared ideologies, others are centred on enhancing social connections, sharing resources, and creating meaningful relationships.

Some see intentional communities as alternative lifestyles. Others see them as impractical social experiments. Some see them as a natural human response to the isolation and fragmentation of modern housing, offering a return to the social bonds and collaborative spirit found in traditional village life. Others see them as ways to address problems that are seen as plaguing modern cities, such as alcohol abuse, poverty, unemployment and crime, especially when used in conjunction with emigration from industrialized countries and colonization of new lands.

The multitude of intentional communities includes collective households, cohousing communities, coliving, ecovillages, monasteries, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, Hutterite colonies, ashrams, and housing cooperatives.

As well, planned developments such as some company towns that provided comfortable workers' housing and aspirations of a stable sober workforce, could be considered intentional communities and sometimes even spark from an aspiration for a utopia.

Ashrams are likely the earliest intentional communities, founded around 1500 BCE. Buddhist monasteries appeared around 500 BCE. Pythagoras founded an intellectual vegetarian commune in about 525 BCE in southern Italy. Hundreds of modern intentional communities were formed across Europe, North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand out of the intellectual foment of utopianism. Intentional communities exhibit the utopian ambition to create a better, more sustainable world for living.

Additional terms referring to an intentional community can be alternative lifestyle, intentional society, cooperative community, withdrawn community, enacted community, socialist colony, communistic society, collective settlement, communal society, commune, mutualistic community, communitarian experiment, experimental community, utopian experiment, practical utopia, and utopian society.

The term utopian community as a synonym for an intentional community might be considered to be of pejorative nature and many intentional communities do not consider themselves to be utopian. Also the alternative term commune is considered to be non-neutral or even linked to leftist politics or hippies.

The purposes of intentional communities vary and may be political, spiritual, economic, or environmental. In addition to spiritual communities, secular communities also exist. One common practice, particularly in spiritual communities, is communal meals. Egalitarian values can be combined with other values, and an egalitarian community is a specific kind of intentional community in which members have equal access to resources and decision-making" and more broadly as "a fair society where all individuals possess equal rights and opportunities, supported by affirmative action". Benjamin Zablocki categorized communities this way: