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Two weeks ago, standing under the big, round harvest moon in my large suburban backyard, my usual fantasies of an in-ground pool and a little sauna-hut surrounded by sleek landscaping were replaced by thoughts of tall corn and a gourd-engorged cornucopia. Quarantined, now, by my wooden fence, the rich soil sporting useless lawn underfoot once produced crops that fed the city until the late 1950s. Raising myself up and peering into the next-door neighbour's yard and the one after that, I couldn't help but wonder if this land might ever be put to that sort of honest work again.

Los Angeles-based architect and entrepreneur Stephanie Smith, 42, began to have similar thoughts after she purchased a five-acre site in Joshua Tree, Calif., with “a little homesteader cabin on it” which she then transformed into EcoShack, a “design lab to experiment with new green, off-the-grid architecture.”

After designing a modern version of the ancient Mongolian yurt – a collapsible bamboo frame and weatherproof fabric dwelling she christened the Nomad Yurt – she turned her attention to communes, since they kept turning up in her yurt research anyway. She became “intrigued” with the lifestyle and wondered how it might be modernized, like her yurt, to make it “more appropriate for today” since the idea of communes had become “toxic” since the hippie days.

“One of the mistakes they made in the sixties and seventies was to reject the way that we lived and move to a remote place and start over,” Ms. Smith explains. “The definition of commune on Wikipedia is ‘a community in which resources are shared' so if you think about that in a very reductive way, there are a lot of communities around.”

Like the suburban kind many of us call home. In her reinterpretation of the commune, there wouldn't be any relocation to the desert or a push to trade in the sedan for a VW microbus, but, rather, life as usual with minor adjustments. To conduct her initial research, she contacted people living on three cul-de-sacs in suburban Los Angeles and set up potluck dinner parties. “I like the idea of five or six houses all facing each other,” she says. “It's a kind of automatic community waiting to happen.”

There were no presuppositions about the kinds of resources neighbours might share – sustainable stuff like a vegetable garden was a great idea but so too was a babysitting club – since the “goal” of the project was to help people save money by buying less, which, ultimately, is environmentally responsible.

“We're on the cusp of a new definition of green,” she says.

While these initial communes were a success, almost everyone asked if there was a website to help with organization. Oddly enough, there wasn't, so Ms. Smith created www.wecommune.com so that anyone, anywhere could “come together” even without her guidance: “I said, ‘You know what, I want to start 5,000 communes in cul-de-sacs around the world, how am I going to do that because there's just me,'” she remembers with a laugh. Online for only eight weeks now, Ms. Smith estimates that more than 400 communes have been created.

But are Ms. Smith's idea's too California for Toronto?

“[T]heir cul-de-sacs look just like ours,” says Lloyd Alter, Toronto-based senior writer for Discovery's www.treehugger.com and president of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario. “I looked at my mother-in-law's house on a cul-de-sac in Victoria Village at Lawrence and Victoria Park [in Toronto], at the land between all the houses, and calculated the food that could be grown in their back yards: They could feed themselves and a lot of other people.” He estimates that Scarborough's yards could “feed the city.”

While Mr. Alter has seen at least one model of communal living on Hillsdale Avenue in Leaside where fences have come down and “everyone shares and co-operates,” he says the “best stuff” is happening in the German suburb of Vauban and in Ikea's BoKlok developments throughout Europe. “Robert Frost was wrong when he said, ‘Good fences make good neighbours,'” he quips.

Should good Toronto neighbours want to use Ms. Smith's website to “formalize” fenceless relationships, all it takes are a few mouse-clicks and boxes to fill in, since WeCommune is absolutely free. Ms. Smith plans to keep it gratis by structuring it like Mint.com, a free personal budgeting website that allows financial institutions to dangle better interest rates in front of their users; in the case of Ms. Smith's site, only those businesses that could offer goods or services specific to each commune would be allowed that privilege: A childcare collective, for example, may get an e-mail from Costco offering a discount on diapers.

Mr. Alter, who first wrote about Ms. Smith on Treehugger in March, suggests “everywhere there is grass” there is room for a new way of thinking and co-operating. And while I enjoy the privacy of my grassy backyard, I'd be willing to give some of it up if it meant saving money.

“We have a cash economy, we have a credit economy, both of which are ailing and broken,” finishes Ms. Smith. “Can we not create a third economy, a resource-sharing economy? I want WeCommune to be at the heart of that.”