Walden Two - Real World Efforts

Real World Efforts

Many efforts to create a Walden Two in real life are detailed in Hilke Kuhlmann's Living Walden Two and in Daniel W. Bjork's B.F. Skinner.

Some of these efforts include:

  • 1955 In New Haven, Connecticut a group led by Arthur Gladstone tries to start a community.
  • 1966 Waldenwoods conference is held in Hartland, Michigan, comprising 83 adults and 4 children, coordinated through the Breiland list (a list of interested people who wrote to Skinner and were referred to Jim Breiland).
  • 1966 Matthew Israel forms the Association for Social Design (ASD), to promote a Walden Two, which soon finds chapters in Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and Washington, D.C..
  • 1967 Israel's ASD forms the Morningside House in Arlington, Massachusetts.
  • 1967 Twin Oaks Community (website) is started in Louisa County, Virginia.
  • 1969 Keith Miller in Lawrence, Kansas founds a 'Walden house' student collective that becomes The Sunflower House 11.
  • 1971 Roger Ulrich starts "an experimental community named Lake Village in Kalamazoo, Michigan".
  • 1971 Los Horcones (website) is started in Hermosillo, Mexico.
  • 1972 Sunflower House 11 is (re)born in Lawrence, Kansas from the previous experiment.
  • 1973 East Wind (website) in south central Missouri.

Twin Oaks is detailed in Kat Kinkade's book, A Walden Two experiment: The first five years of Twin Oaks Community. Originally started as a Walden Two community, it has since rejected its Walden Two position, however it still uses its modified Planner-Manager system as well as a system of labor credits based on the book.

Los Horcones does not use the Planner-Manager governance system described in Walden Two. They refer to their governance system as a "personocracy". This system has been "developed through ongoing experimentation". In contrast to Twin Oaks, Los Horcones "has remained strongly committed to an experimental science of human behavior and has described itself as the only true Walden Two community in existence." In 1989, B. F. Skinner said that Los Horcones "comes closest to the idea of the 'engineered utopia' that he put forth in Walden Two".

Read more about this topic:  Walden Two

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