Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life is a 1947 book on community and city planning by Percival and Paul Goodman.

Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life argues for "human scale" urban planning, in which buildings, cities, economics, and society are made to suit immediate community needs.

Their survey of urban production includes the American mill town, Chinese and Soviet industrial plans, and Buckminster Fuller's utopian project.

While the authors lament a perceived loss of collective American spirit, they compare communal experiments to the artistic vanguards in that many are unsuccessful but influential in pollinating subsequent efforts.

They criticize American obsession with large, industrial buildings and, in the International Style of Le Corbusier, a lack of humane aesthetic.

[7] The second program, "The New Commune",[6] is an integrated community with libertarian (anarchist) values of liberating work, industrial democracy, and aesthetics.

In these self-sufficient integrated communities, expert workers collectively drive industry and redesign both work and domestic life with psychological, moral, and technical considerations.

The idea developed from Percy's exhibition concept for a "city of tomorrow", which he had unsuccessfully proposed for Otis Elevator at the 1939 World's Fair.

[15] Vintage Books (a Random House imprint[16]) released a revised second edition in August 1960[15] alongside Paul Goodman's landmark Growing Up Absurd.

[18] Throughout Communitas, historians Theodore Roszak and Talbot Hamlin saw the spirit of artistry, from the wit and bite of the authors' words to its interwoven illustrations,[24][25] as city planning from the perspective of a novelist.

[25] Though writer and intellectual Dwight Macdonald admired Communitas, he criticized Goodman's prose for being “fuzzy” in a manner unlike the author's thoughts.

[32] Throughout Communitas, the authors, as New Yorkers, are dismissive of cultures unlike the megacity's, potentially conflating historical precedent with the natural effects of environmental design.

[36] The book was among the foremost influences of American historian Gar Alperovitz[37] and was British anarchist Colin Ward's favorite work from Goodman's oeuvre.

[38] The "communitas" concept in Victor Turner's anthropology of ritual borrowed from the Goodmans,[39] as did some communal experiments of the 1960s, including progressive schools, free universities, and living–working communes.