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.
I haven’t looked into it yet but it does seem interesting to research.
This isn’t something I would be too excited about, personally. Online groups intended to be for autistic people quickly get overrun by people who do not respect autistic persons’ individuality, do not respect that some people are profoundly disabled by autism, and frankly get very cliquey if not culty. I would assume this sort of thing would be worse in a living environment. They can’t just kick you out of a group for disagreeing, they can kick you out of your home. You cannot log off to escape the bullying and harassment so prevalent in online “autistic” communities.
I love other autistic people on an individual level. And in fact I’m quite certain many of the people who are causing the problems in these online communities are not in fact autistic. Autistic people can cause problems too, of course (anyone can), but I don’t believe the online autistic communities would have these specific problems if they were really compromised of at least a majority of autistic people. Or if there was a way to include severely and moderately-severe autistic people in our communities more. It feels like we’re leaving them behind in the ‘nothing about us without us’ realm and in our communities.
It’s 2am and I’m sleepy, sorry for the lack of coherence.