Erskine | Simon's Blog

It is indeed an interesting question… I’m someone who talks about community a lot. All the time. and I have been asked what I mean by community so I can sympathize here with you Simon because it’s not an easy question to answer.

I guess that essentially what I mean when I talk about community is connections between people. What I think we should be aiming for is the best quality connections between people that we can make. The more interlacing connections between people that you have, the better a place is.

See, I did mention place eventually because I think that place plays a central role in our traditional understanding of community, and whilst our lives are now much less centred on place because of all the connections we have to other places (through technology, and through history - we travel a lot more, we move home and job a lot more and build up connections to lots of different places) it is still important.

I think that the yearning that people have for ‘a sense of community’ has a lot to do with that traditional sense - knowing your neighbours, doing things as a group who live near each other, feeling connected to people in a location - because that’s what we know and traditionally understand to be a community, but actually I think that we can get that sense of community from more modern disparate communities - the communities of interest and so forth that Guy mentioned.

For example, and this is completely anecdotal, but I think still interesting… I’m from a rural farming background, and the notion of community that I was brought up with was really about the traditional sense - all about location and proximity to people that we knew. I have now lived for several years in an inner city area with a very transient and diverse population. I feel totally connected to community there, but it’s completely different to the kind of community I experienced growing up. For me there’s a lot more going on where I live now, and a lot more possibilities for making connections with people. Because it’s transient people put a lot of energy into getting involved. there’s no complacency about things always being there because nothing and no-one is ever there for very long. The sense of community that I feel does have a connection to place, because lots of it happens in a location, but it’s flexible and stretches beyond that. There are lots of people in my communities that don’t live in that location. It’s also more about multiple communities… and this is where I start thinking about the difference between a community and a group of friends.

how about if a group of friends is primarily about the individuals - sure you all do stuff for each other, and it’s about connections, but the driving force is the people. community becomes an entity in itself, a motivation and reason for doing things, there’s more purpose and reason in a community. you do things for the good of the community rather than the good of each other (although of course the two are intertwined).

right, this is turning into an essay and i’m running out of steam. what does anyone else think communnity is??

01/05 at 03:29 from katie

05/05 at 00:20 from Guy Julier