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How to Live Together
Owenites



New Lanark, Scotland
Owenites, Utopian Socialists
Single-Family Housing
Worker Housing
Private Property
1800 - 1824


New Lanark Mills was, at the time, the largest spinning mill in the UK. The mill employed between 1,400 and 1,500 people, mostly women and children. Robert Owen, whose father-in-law owned the mill, implemented a number of revolutionary social welfare programs and protections including fair wages, good working conditions, decent housing and modern schools.

Owen believed that human behavior was shaped by the environment and could be improved through better education and settings. At New Lanark, food and clothing could be bought at cost from the company store, affordable housing was available, as was free medical care. The importance of education was emphasized and children were encouraged to attend local schools which only charged a small fee. There were outdoor spaces provided for gardening and recreation.

Frustrated by his failure to improve the lives of the working class in England, Robert Owen chose Indiana as the site of a new cooperative society. The New World, he assumed, hadn’t yet been spoiled by prejudices and conventions, by commercialization and class hatred.  New Lanark’s modest size, sense of community, and rural atmosphere served as the foundation for Owen’s reform communities. 


1840 Robert Owen’s Model Mill in Gloucester Drawing: Granger/Rex/Shutterstock 1965 New Lanark Plan. Canmore National Record of the Historic Enviornment - SC 524010 1865 New Lanark Plan. Caithness Row Plan, 1965 © RCAHMS

Owennites 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.