What is Community? (Part 3 - final)

Community for many urban dwellers does not necessarily exist in the place where they live. How do we build local resilience in the absence of local "communities"?

The answer is... slowly!

My study of people's sense of community has illustrated an issue that is much talked about in various laments about urban life. It is expressed variously as a lack of connection, social isolation, anonymity, lack of social cohesion, agression and other such negatively flavoured attribues.The way we live in large cities does not naturally lend itself to forming strong bonds in our local neighbourhoods it seems. Our employment, social circles, interests and family ties take us to many locations outside our neighbourhood. Our local neighbourhood connections may be limited to a neighbour or two, several local shops, maybe a school, library, pub, coffee shop or other local establishment we interact with in a utilitarian way.

While we might lament the lack of community connection and support, it is simply a fact of urban life, as meeting many of our needs does not rely on entirely local infrastructure, enterprise or individuals. We are not overly dependent of local community support at the neighbourhood level in our day to day lives.

All that changes rapidly and unpredictably of course in the case of crises. I remember helping my nephew defend his Killara home against the bushfires that took several lives and a number of homes in his street. The community was certainly galvanised into helping each other out in a whole variety of ways - tools, labour, information, sustenance and so on, in that nasty situation. The problem is, when the crisis goes away, so does the community connection. So how do we work with this reality?

Transition initiatives take on this challenge of trying to engage people in community re-forming processes in the absence of real and present dangers. We have to accept that people live in various communities of interest, not just in their local suburb, and work with that, persistently raising awareness of the vulnerabilities that do exist in the absebce of local resilience and using the diversity of people, social networks, sub-cultures and communication channels that we find in our local areas. It is a long process no doubt. When we have people talking about local resilience and solutions in libraries, in schools, in pubs, cafes, neighbourhood centres, parks, 'ocal businesses, on trains and buses and everywhere else you can imagine in a locality, then we'll know we are making progress.When we have ratepayers consistently approaching their councils with requests and proposals to support local sustainability projects, then we'll know we are on the way. When we have local and state planning laws being changed as a result of citizen pressure then we'll know we are heading in the right direction.

It will take time, it will produce diverse outcomes, but it will eventually make a difference. The Permaculture principle of small, slow solutions seems very pertinent to our challenge.