Community is a concept, an experience, and a central part of being human. It is a subject that touches every one of us, a subject so complex and interdisciplinary that it takes a work like this to provide the depth and breadth of information that students, scholars, information specialists, and professionals in both public and private sectors need if they are to understand the nature of community fully.
We need The Encyclopedia of Community because we live at a time when our desire for community seems to grow in proportion to our sense that it is declining. And yet, there have never been so many efforts under way to build, restore, find, or study community as there are today. Some of these efforts reflect a longing for an earlier era when, we imagine, we could find common values. Many images of community<M>trick-or-treating in handmade costumes, World War II victory gardens, the Queen’s Jubilee street parties<M>are nostalgic. But there is a huge array of contemporary efforts to be explored – community health networks, online support groups, local currencies, or cohousing developments.
The Encyclopedia is not, however, an unthinking celebration of community. Community is something we run from, as well as towards. Community has its downsides. Readers will find that the contradictions of community are examined in dozens of articles as well as later in this Introduction. We explore hundreds of different communities, the human webs that provide essential feelings of connectedness, belonging, and meaning. Communities are indeed the core and essence of humanity, around which everything else is woven – or spun. They provide emotional and practical security, and a sense of continuity through shared memory. They give us a sense of purpose. They sustain us throughout our lives, in neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, apartment buildings, as well as in more extended networks of friendship and common purpose. These human webs are generally intimate enough to allow face-to-face contact. They depend on personal knowledge and trust. They are a primary source of happiness in good times, and essential sources of support and solace during bad times. Community is widely studied. The disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, public administration, town planning, and religious studies all examine aspects of community, and for all these disciplines, The Encyclopedia of Community should prove an indispensable resource. For scholars and students at the college level, the encyclopedia is a state-of-the-art review. For people outside the academic world, it is a unique resource tool. Many health professionals, government officials, social workers, and clergy are focused on community issues and community development. They will be able turn to the encyclopedia for inspiration and illumination, for stories and strategies. The Encyclopedia of Community gives us, at last, a vantage point from which we can examine these vital human webs and explore a vital aspect of individual and social experience. In hundreds of articles, leading scholars address what may be the most perplexing and challenging questions facing us in the twenty-first century: How and why do humans maintain their connections to one another, to particular geographical places, and to shared social, religious, and ethnic traditions? For most of history the community has been indispensable. Pioneers and settlers in countries such as the
Either the gap between cities and villages will somehow be bridged by renegotiating the terms of symbiosis, and/or differently constructed primary communities will arise to counteract the tangled anonymity of urban life. Religious sects and congregations are the principal candidates for this role. But communities of belief must somehow insulate themselves from unbelievers, and that introduces frictions, or active hostilities, into the cosmopolitan web. How then sustain the web and also make room for life-sustaining primary communities?
Ironically, therefore, to preserve what we have, we and our successors must change our ways by learning to live simultaneously in a cosmopolitan web and in various and diverse primary communities. How to reconcile such opposites is the capital question for our time and probably will be for a long time to come. (William H. McNeill and J. R. McNeill 2003, pp. 326<N>327).
Why Community?
Over the past century and a half, especially in the
Social fragmentation has many causes, and there is considerable debate about what really causes the breakdown of community. Some claim that new but still satisfactory forms of community are replacing the old ones. Factors discussed in the encyclopedia include work patterns, family structure, age demographics, suburbanization, television and computers, and women’s roles.
One of the most important facts about modern life may be that we have more connections and fewer dependencies. As a result, many people seem to think of community as an amenity, not a necessary state of being or a reciprocal commitment, and in fact the term seems to mean simply “home and comfort†to some. Ironically, some writers present community in a way that seems positively individualistic, focused purely on the benefits to the individual. These approaches present a fresh set of challenges, which the Encyclopedia of Community can prepare us to address. Consider the problem of community development in rural areas. Newcomers seek out bucolic, arcadian surroundings<M>but then want all the amenities of the cities they have left behind while being less interested in those unique characteristics of the area that make it special to natives: the public spaces that confer a unique place identity; strong ties that form overlapping, supportive social networks; and taken-for-granted relationships that cross generations. Housing developments encroach on the natural environment while urban attitudes<M>and rising housing prices<M>can make local people feel that their community is being altered in ways they cannot control. Small towns have been portrayed by novelists and social scientists as having solid, even rigid, social structures, but to some scholars they now seem amorphous and fragile. For many, the violent events of September 11, 2001, were a powerful reminder that even in modern, individualistic societies we are still dependent on one another in times of crisis. Community was the buzzword in the months immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Tony Blair, the
How to Use the Encyclopedia of Community
The Encyclopedia of Community: From the Village to the Virtual World, in four volumes, draws together the work of 399 contributors from eighteen countries. It contains a total of 1.25 million words: one million words in 500 articles; an additional 100,000 words in 266 extensive primary-text sidebars drawn from letters, diaries, society records, memoirs, novels, newspaper accounts, and community plans; and finally appendices of 150,000 words. Articles range in length from 500 to 6,000 words, and there are more than 100 visuals, including photographs, tables, and charts. While many encyclopedias are written by a handful of nonexperts who simply assemble information from other reference works, the Encyclopedia of Community is the work of highly visible scholars at dozens of major institutions. The contributions here represent fresh, original thinking at the cutting edge of a variety of disciplines. Among our hundreds of authors are Ray Oldenburg, writing on bars and pubs and on “third placesâ€; Hasia Diner (author of Jewish Americans), writing on the Lower East Side; Paul Duguid (coauthor of Social Life of Information), writing on communities of practice; Charles Durrett (coauthor of Cohousing), writing on cohousing; Amitai Etzioni, writing on communitarianism; Amy Jo Kim (author of Community Building on the Web), writing on building virtual communities; Jack Levin (author of Will to Kill) writing on hate; William McNeill, writing on villages and on dance and drill; George Ritzer (author of McDonaldization of Society), writing on McDonaldization; Dell Upton (author of Architecture in the United States) writing on New Urbanism, and Min Zhou (coeditor of Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader), writing on Asian American communities.
The Encyclopedia of Community addresses these and many other questions:
Typesetter: Please place set following as bulleted list
§ How have people experienced community, throughout history and around the world?
§ How are communities different from other kinds of groups and associations?
§ Are we really “bowling alone,†or have we found new forms of community thanks to widespread mobility and the Internet?
§ Have cars and television destroyed our sense of community?
In the four appendices in Volume 4, readers will find a wide variety of resources to help them find solutions to such questions as:
Typesetter: Please place set following as bulleted list
§ How can I build, or find, community?
§ How can community help my family, my school, or my business?
We have made great efforts to ensure that our coverage of community from a theoretical perspective does not obscure the fact that community is the experience of real people. We have found a variety of ways to make real life stories part of the Encyclopedia, often by using sidebars of primary text to show the human dimension of ideas and beliefs about community. Over half the articles are accompanied by sidebars drawn from fiction and nonfiction, including excerpts from ethnographic reports (eyewitness accounts written by anthropologists). By kind permission of Frances Moore Lappé, we also present extracts from the archives of the American News Service, a project of the Center for Living Democracy, founded by Frances Moore Lappé and Paul Martin DuBois in 1995. The full archives are being made available to researchers by Berkshire Publishing Group and Ms. Lappé at www.berkshirepublishing.com/ans. Nor have we forgotten that community features prominently in popular culture, whether popular books such as Clan of the Cave Bear and the Harry Potter series, well-known literary works, such as Pride and Prejudice, or television programs, such as Mayberry R.F.D. and Ed<M>not to mention films. Our Community in Popular Culture appendix includes 200 novels, 141 nonfiction books, 47 stage productions, 229 movies, 28 documentaries, 64 television programs, and 63 songs that embody some aspect of the theme of community. Scholars and practitioners will find it thought provoking and teachers will be able to use it to encourage analysis and discussion. Besides that, it’s just plain fun. Finally, skeptics who wonder whether community is a topic large enough to merit an encyclopedia of this scale will be convinced not only by the 500 expert-written articles but also by the Master Bibliography of Community, which includes 4,800 citations to books and journal articles. The literature on community is vast because the topic is at the core of the human experience. The Encyclopedia of Community’s Master Bibliography is the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and international bibliography for the study of community, and we trust that it will be of great value to researchers.
Encyclopedias should always be organized for the convenience of the reader. We have divided the articles in the Encyclopedia of Community by category, based on the editors’ widely varied interests and expertise, but they’ve been presented here in A-to-Z order. This means the reader will find Apartheid next to
Coverage
The Encyclopedia of Community covers hundreds of efforts to change, revitalize, and maintain communities; it presents varied and often conflicting perspectives on what community is and what it means. Its articles explore types of community (intentional communities, ethnic communities, and community colleges, for example), famous communities, issues and trends in community building, institutions that influence and sustain communities, and a wide variety of concepts and theories. Important terms such as social capital, civic engagement, sense of community, and communitarianism are explained. In terms of historical reach, the Encyclopedia reaches back to the earliest days of human settlements, continues through the centuries to eighteenth-century utopian societies, covers the communes of the 1960s, and probes today’s cybercommunities. The following list outlines the areas of community research that have been brought together for the first time in the Encyclopedia of Community and credits the editor who reviewed the articles in each category.
Community Design (Roberta Moudry)
Ways in which the planning and design of a community can affect its development, and how its physical development can affect the lives of its inhabitants.
Community Economics (Michael Shuman)
Key concepts involved in the ability of a community to allocate resources and provide goods and services to all its residents.
Human Development (Robin Jarrett)
Community contexts influencing human and family development across the life cycle from childhood to old age.
Intentional Communities (William Metcalf)
Historic and contemporary full-time, residential communities in which members have deliberately come together to live.
Internet and Communities (Barry Wellman)
Changes that have been wrought on world society and on our understanding of the nature of community with the advent of new technologies.
Rural Life (Sonya Salamon)
Distinguishing features of rural people and places, as well as contemporary issues related to rural poverty and community development.
Social Capital (Thomas Sander)
Key concepts and definitions related to the idea of social capital<M>i.e., that social networks have value stemming from trust, reciprocity, and information flows between individuals.
Social Life (Ray Oldenburg)
Basic concepts of social structure, social organization, social institutions, social differentiation, and social processes that influence daily interactions.
Urban Studies (Dennis Judd)
Understanding urban areas and urban issues through the study of community and of neighborhoods in particular.
Historical and Contemporary Communities (David Levinson and Michael Zuckerman)
Articles on specific communities, some place-based, such as Appalachia and
Affinity Group Communities
Communities or categories of communities in which membership is based on common interest, such as book clubs, reading groups, and artists’ colonies.
Instrumental Communities
Communities or categories of communities in which membership is based on the shared desire to achieve specific goals, whether political, economic, or other. Examples include activist communities and hospices.
Primordial Communities
Communities or categories of communities in which membership is based on ties of blood, kinship, race, ethnicity, or deeply held shared beliefs, such as Asian American communities and monastic communities.
Proximate Communities
Communities or categories of communities in which membership is based on residence in a particular place, such as shantytowns or condominiums.
Global Studies (Karen Christensen and David Levinson)
The Encyclopedia of Community gives considerable attention to global topics such as participatory democracy, consumerism, cultural identity, and individualism that are viewed differently and have differing impacts in different parts of the world. Throughout the encyclopedia we show diverse political, cultural, and religious perspectives towards private obligation, civic engagement, and how best to live together. Authors come from around the world and a total of eighteen nations, and the editors have made a determined effort to go beyond the distinctly
Biographies
In order to fully cover these themes, we have chosen to include only a very limited number of biographical entries, and, like many other publications, we have largely excluded living people. However hundreds of people, both past and present, who have been or are influential in the development of communities or our thinking about community are discussed in context in the relevant articles.
What Is Community?
Community is a diffuse concept, and what is meant by community varies widely from one culture to another. The word itself derives from the same Latin root as the word common: communis, meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “fellowship, community of relations or feelings.†Medieval Latin used communis to mean “a body of fellows or fellow-townsmen,†and today community has both an abstract and a concrete meaning: in the abstract, a sense of commonality and, in the concrete, actual, specific groups of people who have certain circumstances or interests in common.
It sometimes seems that anything can be called a community. Our goal in the encyclopedia is not to eliminate some definitions and elevate others, but to take the broadest possible look at the multitude of human webs <M>groups, networks, ties, and bonds<M>that we call community. Some people imagine that community came after family, beginning when humans started living in bands. But world historians such as David Christian explain that bands, both pre-human and pre-chimpanzee, came first. Both humans and chimpanzees are, as Aristotle suggested over two thousand years ago, social rather than individual creatures. These earliest of communities served for defense and coordinated action against predators, made possible the intensive care needed by human infants, and also provided opportunities to exchange information<M>not so different, really, from some of the things that bring communities together today. And while foraging societies spent most of the year in family groups, rules of exogamy (that is, prohibiting people from mating with close kin) exist in all human societies. Recent research suggests that given sufficient resources, foraging people routinely come together for special events (such as, for example, the aboriginal Australian festivals called corroborees), and have done so for as long as human culture has existed, some 250,000 years. In the distant past, a vivacious sense of community helped proto-humans survive by diffusing information and making them more effectively cooperative. While sociality is a characteristic of many (but not all) animals, community is the defining characteristic of human alone. Only humans form social groups, or webs, that can exchange and share attitudes, ideas, beliefs, and identity. The flow of human history, in fact, depends on the ways these human webs expanded and gathered power across the millennia, thanks to competition that rewarded more effectual cooperation among ever-larger numbers of individuals. Another important concept that has <M>like community<M>struggled for a clear, authoritative definition is culture, the core concept in the field of anthropology. The debate about what culture is went on for several decades until in the early 1950s the profession asked the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber at the
The community and the nuclear family are the only social groups that are genuinely universal. They occur in every known human society, and both are also found in germinal form on a subhuman level. Nowhere on earth do people live regularly in isolated families. Everywhere territorial propinquity, supported by divers other bonds, unites at least a few neighboring families into a larger social group all of whose members maintain face-to-face relationships with one another. (Murdock 1949, 79<N>80)
The lesson here is that absolute definitions are not necessary, and that it may be the fluidity of a core concept that makes it so useful. Community may be thought of as a geographic place, shared hobbies or interests, a warm sense of togetherness, interaction in a common space such as a chat room, and so forth. The Encyclopedia brings together many views of community, not eliminating any definition but providing a forum in which they can be compared and understood. Whatever definition the reader has in mind, we are confident that all major aspects of it will be covered.
The Contradictions of Community
The proposition is that many of our social ills would vanish if we would all begin to experience one another (once again) as members of a community, a goal that can be facilitated by small-scale settlement patterns that encourage face-to face interactions among diverse neighbors. But what happens when one’s neighbors want to party until 2 a.m., or wash their cars and play loud rap music on the village green, or let their lawns grow wild? (Dell
Community is a concept, like humanity or peace, that virtually no one has taken the trouble to quarrel with; even its worst enemies praise it. . . . In fact, however, neither our economy, nor our government, nor our educational system runs on the assumption that community has a value<M>a value, that is, that counts in any practical or powerful way. The values that are assigned to community are emotional and spiritual<M>“culturalâ€<M>which makes it the subject of pieties that are merely vocal. (Wendell Berry (1987), The Landscape of Harmony. Five Seasons Press, p. 57)
This is not, in fact, true. Many conservatives love the idea of small communities. W. H. Regnery, the wealthy, conservative businessman who funded Celo Community in North Carolina in the 1930s (as well as the right-wing publishing company with his name), believed that self-sufficient farming rather than urban public housing and industrial jobs would revive the pioneer spirit of the United States. But there have been some who see community and any communitarian tendency as a threat to capitalism, free enterprise, and individual rights. Similarly, there are many political liberals who are strongly committed to individual rights, and who have vehemently combated the rights-and-responsibilities agenda of the communitarian scholars led by Amitai Etzioni. The idea of community does presuppose that the group, people together, have a value and rights. There are times when what is good for the community as a whole is in direct conflict with what is good for a given individual. In recognizing the often harsh realities of community<M>lack of opportunity and privacy, pressure to conform<M>we have attempted to go beyond the popular views of community that see it as little more than a pleasant amenity to be sought and consumed at will.
The Study of Community
Currently thousands of scholars, activists, writers, government officials, students, and others around the world are studying efforts to change, revitalize, and maintain communities. There are hundreds of community studies programs and centers at colleges in the North America and Europe, and community is also covered in such diverse disciplines as sociology, anthropology, geography, political science, history, psychology, environmental studies, economics, public health, education, management, leadership, urban and rural studies, architecture and planning, American studies, medicine, and social work. With so many people from so many fields interested in community, it is no surprise that numerous paradigms, rationales, theories, and research methods have been applied to the study of community. Broadly speaking, these myriad approaches can be divided into two general and somewhat overlapping categories. The first, and more traditional, approach stresses the study of community and community life through description, analysis, comparison, and explanation. The second, more recent, approach is an activist one: It seeks to change communities and sees communities as a force for social change. Since the turbulent 1960s many university community studies programs have trained young people to utilize the community as an agent of social transformation. Numerous private and nonprofit community development organizations take the second approach, and many scholars see community as an organizing principle for social action in areas as various as economic development and environmental activism. For example, the architecture movement known as the New Urbanism aims to create developments that will encourage community life. Similarly, environmentalists are forming communities called ecovillages, where they can develop and practice sustainable living techniques in the company of like-minded people. The study of community by social and behavioral scientists continues to be informed by the seminal work of the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855<N>1936) and the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858<N>1917). Tönnies set forth the basic dichotomy between community (gemeinschaft) and society (gesellschaft), while Durkheim articulated the basic nature of emerging urban settlements. Until 1970
Family
We are familiar with what has become a common political adage, that it takes a village to raise a child, meaning that child rearing should be a community effort. In intentional communities, child rearing has often been considered of particular importance, and in some communities child rearing is deliberately taken over by the community as a whole. Recently, urban sociology researchers have concentrated on low-resourced, inner-city neighborhoods, and have demonstrated that these contexts have a negative “community effect†on youth. This urban research highlights the question of what to do when collective child-rearing customs become (or are) problematic. Youth function as do the canaries in the mine shaft (or, as the sociologist Ralph Brown suggests, canaries in the gemeinschaft): How youth fare developmentally is an indicator of a community’s well-being.
Social Capital
Social capital shows that in every act of giving or reciprocity, there is an act of short-term altruism and long-term self-interest (since these networks, norms, and behaviors ultimately improve the community, which means a better life for the giver). The term social capital also stands in strong contrast to the warmer, looser, fuzzy sense of community popular in everyday parlance. Social capital clearly appeals to hard-nosed economists, but some wonder whether the phenomena of human networks and reciprocity should be reduced to transaction-based economic terms.
Technology
Technology has made possible the formation of new communities that are very different from earlier communities<M>but one has to remember that simply calling something a community does not mean that it provides its members with the same benefits that earlier, less technological forms of community have provided. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam provides useful observations about the fact that even if users of a chatroom call something a community it doesn’t mean that they can easily mobilize other members of the chatroom, or get social support, or job leads from their fellow community members. Other scholars have pointed out that technology often reinforces our existing ways of relating to one another rather than creating new ways. Nevertheless, the notion of virtual communities has excited the world of community scholarship, and the worlds of learning, information management, and scholarship generally. John Seely Brown, Director of the
Business
The study of community has also been of much interest in the business world. Perhaps the key work remains that of German social theorist Max Weber (1864<N>1920), who set forth the basic model of the modern bureaucracy. In the twentieth century, much effort has been devoted to applying the findings of social and behavioral research to corporations. The goal is to use empirical research to help build and maintain more effective work units and foster communication between people at different levels, and the word community is used, in a variety of ways, throughout the literature on corporate human resources and organizational development. In the Encyclopedia of Community we have expanded this focus by giving a great deal attention to community economics as well, and to social capital in the workplace.
Community in Private Life
Many, perhaps most, of the articles in the Encyclopedia of Community have something to say about the impact of community in our daily lives. For the many readers who are not only trying to understand human ties in an academic way but who also are also curious about how to experience, personally, a richer sense of community, the Encyclopedia provides many perspectives and possible solutions, from cohousing to intentional communities. The communities in which we live have direct impact on our private lives in several ways. First, communities provide us with a sense of identity. This can be something as basic as what we call roots<M>which, naturally, extend beyond family to place and culture<M>to the idea of a hometown. There are many people today who simply have no single place they think of as home, whose family ties are weaker than anything imaginable to our ancestors, and who, not surprisingly, spend time trying to create new communities to fill that void. But the majority of people in the world continue to be rooted in ways that are hard for mobile, urbanized, individualistic Westernized people to imagine; as a result, both the experience of and ideas about community vary enormously from country to country. Second, communities frequently provide us with a sense of meaning and purpose. This is certainly true of religious communities, in which shared meaning (specific spiritual or theological beliefs) might be described as the primary unifier. But the need to find a sense of meaning and purpose is at the core of human groups as diverse as social activists and Trekkies<M>and the Encyclopedia explores the shared meanings that link people in communities. Third, communities provide conviviality. At its simplest community is, as the popular television program Cheers put it, the place “where everybody knows your name.†Ray Oldenburg called such spots “third places†(third, because they are neither the workplace nor the home); they are all the places where people hang out, exchange news, and connect. The Encyclopedia touches on this theme in a number of articles, but conviviality<M>the pleasures of community<M> is a topic that merits further exploration. Finally, civility<M>how we behave toward strangers in the public sphere<M>is an important feature of community. A particularly diffuse concept, civility is beginning to get attention from civic leaders, scholars, and even political pundits. Civility extends to how we treat public property and facilities, how we park, and how we address and interact with those who are not part of our community. Increased travel and tourism, which brings strangers into even remote small towns, mean that we continually come into contact with people we will never see again. All cultures have had social norms for dealing with strangers, and many cultures have had strong requirements for hospitality. But what we see today in manyplaces is a breakdown of basic civility. As a result, civic and school leaders, amongst others, are pressing for more attention to this aspect of living together.
What Have We Learned?
An encyclopedia creates a community<M>a virtual think tank<M>of scholars. Although our mission was not to produce findings, the process of putting together the Encyclopedia of Community broadened our horizons and increased our understanding of our human community. As the Encyclopedia is used by students, scholars, and professionals throughout the world, we expect it to generate further research, international collaborations, and the testing of ideas and theories. During the eighteen months it took to create the encyclopedia, we made a variety of observations that may be of interest to readers. First, the thorough research and countless case studies our contributors supplied have confirmed the importance of community in our lives. Community, we discovered, is related to family and friendship, but it has dimensions of its own that are vital to individual health and to the health of societies. We found that much of the study of community has often been remote from the daily lives and concerns of the people studied. It needs to be broadened to address a number of pressing topics in definitive ways. These include child rearing, social support and inclusion, face-to-face communities after urbanization, the survival of traditional communities, and bridging or integration between different communities. We also hope that gender will be examined more closely. It is striking that the best-known writers on community are, even today, men. While we have many women contributors, there is a preponderance of men, especially in public policy and economics. This is true in other emerging fields, usually because male scholars are in a position to take more career risks with new topics. Community is a human story, a human need, and we look forward to seeing more work done to bring gendered perspectives into every area of community studies. Some topics that we wanted to include had not yet been studied broadly enough in terms of their relationship to community. These include sex and sexuality (that is, intimate relationships in community context) and shared work (both historically and in modern times, in the workplace and among neighbors and friends). Environmentalists often propose that living in small communities<M>with local food and energy supplies and little dependence on cars<M>is the key to solving global environmental problems. . While there are many efforts in this direction, from mass transit systems to community supported agriculture, we need a deeper understanding of the challenges involved in using communityto solve environmental problems. The relationship between community and consumerism needs further attention, and we also need more study, especially internationally, of the connection between community and modernity. Comprehensive, cross-cultural coverage of these topics will be of great value. We would also like to see more knowledge drawn from archaeology and evolutionary history. Why has community been around for so many millennia, and how has our need for community evolved as the species (and, later, various cultures) evolved? In prehistoric days, living in community increased each individual’s chances of survival, as together they could protect one another and work together to develop and manage a consistent food supply. More research into the sociobiology of community would be invaluable, as there are likely to be considerable debates over whether we are hard-wired to cooperate and what the implications and consequences are if it turns out we are. We expect to see continued and increasing interest in the effects of development on community, in rich and poor nations, in urban, rural, and suburban areas. In Westernized countries, newer suburban subdivisions lack shared public space, yet without vibrant public spaces the community identity of a town erodes. What will that mean for the future of the suburban subdivisions? We are learning that for small towns as much as for big cities, it is important to preserve mixed socioeconomic classes, mixed uses of space, and public spaces in general. As in a city, the combination of commercial and residential activities in a small town makes it resilient by providing a more textured, vital life. Despite having been liberated from place, Americans still long for some idealized place to live equivalent to an agrarian community, a place where one is known and nurtured, a place to which one is attached and where one can sustain a coherent identity. One irony that strikes us is that we only recognized what was at one time most important to us when it is ceasing to be so important to us. Thus, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, his satire of chivalry, when chivalry was waning. Max Weber describes the Protestant ethic as the Protestant ethic ceases to make a difference in the economy or even to differentiate between Protestants and Catholics. Similarly, if the community is now coming into view as never before, the implication is that community is not rising in cultural centrality and power, but declining. Elective identity has increasingly become a human aspiration. It is at once our glory and our agony. Immigrants came to the
The Editors, Berkshire Publishing Group LLC, Great
Leave A Comment