On a quick search, I found this Forbes article and this article from Autism Housing Network. The Autism Housing Network appears to be a treasure trove of resources about this very interesting idea in general.
However, I’m honestly still a bit skeptical to the movement for autistic intentional communities as it stands. I found out about this movement earlier today, when I correctly figured while writing an essay that somebody else had probably already come up with that exact idea. However, while the extant communities are improving people’s lives, they don’t really seem like the sort of radically by-of-and-for-us type of neurodiverse communes that I was imagining while writing my essay. Rather, these extant communities feel like a sort of more status-quo-y liberal housing development with a neurodiverse flavor.
In my essay I had even written about all sorts of pipe dreams of cybernetics and e-democracy to connect different intentional communities together, but I guess that’s all it is: pipe dreams.
My instinctive response is that it’s a terrible idea. While having no expectation to mask is great, it seems to me that gathering a group of people who generally struggle to take care of themselves and their environment and who have very low tolerance for certain environmental stimuli and a deep need for other environmental stimuli is a recipe for chaos.
I attend a local autistic adults zoom group every other week, and it’s great for support and understanding, but if I had to be in the same room as one of the other members their stims would give me a meltdown. I over-empathise emotionally, an autistic friend has almost no emotional empathy, as a result some of our interactions do not go as intended. Multiply these kinds of issues with having to effectively live with eachother and I just don’t see it going well.
Agreed. As someone who’s probably not on the spectrum (but still ND) married to someone who is, I can’t see it going any other way than failing spectacularly.
It seems like it goes more or less fine in practice, and I reckon this is probably because these communities end up being self-selecting to some extent. That the type of autistic person who thinks this sounds like a great idea would also be the type who’d have an easier time in this type of community, while the type who thinks this sounds like a terrible idea wouldn’t move to that type of community to begin with. And that even of the former group, that different intentional communities would end up dominated by different types of autistic people who tend to get along better. You wouldn’t just move in without any idea of who your neighbors are.
Speaking for myself, I’ve attended a monthly local autistic adults group in person, I’ve lived with my autistic brother for most of my life, in my time in public school I had special classes with other ND students and had a few ND friends, and I even spent a year at a dorm school that teaches independent living for ND folks. So for me the idea of living with other autistic people of a diverse variety seems pretty doable. There would obviously still be a number of problems that I’d need to solve with regard to interpersonal interactions or hypersensitivities, but that would still be the case if I lived in a predominantly NT community anyways.