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How to Live Together
New Harmony (Ideal)



Plan for New Harmony, Indiana, USA
Owenites, Utopian Socialists 
Single-Family Housing
Co-op
1825-1826


1 Apartments 2 Towers with industry and common areas

In 1824, Robert Owen bought the Harmonist village of New Harmony, Indiana. The small town would serve as a home base while the new, model community was built nearby. Like Fourier’s Phalanstery, New Harmony would meet the physical and spiritual needs of its occupants, and rely on manufacturing and agriculture. Freedom of religion, open to all (white people), freedom of speech, and equal rights. 

Designed in collaboration with the British architect Stedman Whitwell, the visionary plan for New Harmony would be a three-story quadrangular structure, measuring 1000 feet on each sides. New Harmony’s 1200 residents would be housed according to age and marital status. The first and second stories were reserved for families, while the third floor was for unmarried residents and children above the age of two. Towers at each corner and the middle (2) of the compound would contain manufacturing spaces, kitchens, schools, rooms for lectures, concerts, balls, chapels, laboratories, and committee meetings.   


1825 Ideal: A vision of New Harmony. Image: New Harmony by Stedman Whitwell 1832-33 Reality: New Harmony Church. Painting: Watercolor by Karl Bodmer. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska 1820s Sketches of New Harmony. Drawing: Attributed to Martha Chase. Indiana Public Media


Owenites End Notes

Carmony, Donald F., and Josephine M. Elliott. “New Harmony, Indiana: Robert Owen’s Seedbed for Utopia.” Indiana Magazine of History 76, no. 3 (1980): 161–261. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27790455. Page 162.


Carmony, Donald F., and Josephine M. Elliott. “New Harmony, Indiana: Robert Owen’s Seedbed for Utopia.” Indiana Magazine of History 76, no. 3 (1980): 161–261. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27790455

Ibid, 166

Carmony, Donald F., and Josephine M. Elliott. “New Harmony, Indiana: Robert Owen’s Seedbed for Utopia.” Indiana Magazine of History 76, no. 3 (1980): 163. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27790455


Annie Schneider

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Communes in the New World

The question of how to live together—of how best to live together—is the foundation of any society. The last few years have exposed the fault lines in our current system: climatic catastrophe, economic crisis, supply chain collapse, civil unrest, rampant inequality, and a global pandemic. We live in congested cities and in potentially dangerous proximity, yet remain isolated. In light of these mounting pressures, it’s time to revisit the fundamentals. How to Live Together offers alternative ways of being, thinking, dwelling, and living. It calls into question every basic assumption and prevailing social norm: belief, sex, the nuclear family, property ownership, our relationship to land, production, and consumption. It is both a critique and a roadmap.