What is Community Part 2

It seems that "community" is more of a mental and emotional construct than something tangible and easily identified or defined.  It is something that was probably never even thought about in the small rural villages of the past. I suspect that the villagers just got on with life and took it for granted that they all knew each other, traded food, goods or skills with each other, occasionally fought with each other,socialised together or helped each other out.

The emergence of any serious attempts to understand or define communities seems to have followed the industrial revolution and the gradual shift of people from their small settlements into larger towns and cities which grew around the mines, mills, factories and ports. This change of living to the impersonality of "urban" settlement and the feeling of loss of the intimacy of village life may have been an impetus for the emergence of questioning about community. By the turn of the 20th century urban and suburban life was a reality for an increasing proportiion of the population in the industrialised world (not that cities were a new invention - they have existed since very ancient times as we have learned from archeologists)

Social scientists, in particular Sociologists have been studying community since the early 1900's. Surprise, surprise, they haven't nailed it down yet! One such sociologist, by the name of Hillery in 1955 catalogued no fewer than 94 definitions of community, and nothing much has changed since. In 1972, Roland Warren, another Sociologist suggested a definition that for a community to exist it must be identified in a particular geographical location and meet five tests of its functioning:

1. Socialisation - instilling values, and social norms in its members
2. Economic welfare - providing a living for the community members
3. Social participation - fulfiling people's need for companionship
4. Social control - enforcement of the sommunity's values
5. Mutual support - people are willing to help each other out

This definition itself seems to represent the some of the nostalgic idealisation of communities that seems to colour much of the earlier writing about community as some form of peaceful village, with long-standing residents with kinship ties where people lived in stable harmony, looked out for each others kids and property, knew everyone, helped each other out and had fun together. Modern, less sentimental sociologists point out that such ideal villages and towns probably never existed (even though they were often portrayed in schmaltzy  movies as the typical American small town) and add that these villages were also probably dull, restrictive places with little privacy or room for individualism - the sort of place the kids probably could hardly wait to leave!

Bess et al [(2002) Psychological sense of community: Theory Research and Application.New York. Kluwer Academic] sum  up this mental construct shared by many of us, including urban planners, as "an idealization in place and time of feeling part of a place, with those around us knowing us and caring about us"

The summary opinion of modern sociologists about community is along these lines:

1. Communities aren't always about place - they are sometimes locational and often relational
2. Most of us live in multiple "villages" - where we live, where we work and where we socialise
3. There are no universal truths about community. Communities are a social process

Despite this seemingly vague shoulder-shrug about community, there is much interesting research that has been done about our individual psychological sense of place, our "neighbouring behaviour" and our motivation to create social environments that reflect our values and aspirations. It is in these areas that the opportunity lies, I believe, for Transition initiatives to have an impact, to help build new values-based communities that can forsee and come together to deal with the resiliency challenges that we all face in the future. It later parts fo this "sermon" I want to focus on some ideas about ways that Transition initiatives can make a positive impact in mobilising communal action toward resilience. Better still, why not click on the comment link and throw in your ideas?