On Community Theory
The starting premise for these first thoughts is:
As community organization and behavior differs between that in a small village or town and that in high density urban settings, so does urban community differ from virtual community.
Community behavior can be divided between the individual and the contextual. The differences between venues are primarily contextually driven. As we see through city planning, the context provided generates adaptive behavioral changes, yet the fundamental individual, and therefore communal and civic behavior does not change substantively. It merely adapts to constraints or opportunities made more or less readily available.
Urban dwellers, in general, enjoy a higher degree of both autonomy and privacy than village dwellers. This results in more independence, freedom and opportunity. It also results in more social isolation, less communal interdependence and therefore support, more anonymity and more criminal behavior.
The extent to which conscientious, responsible, and civil behavior is exhibited by the denizens of the virtual world is actually quite remarkable. The perils of anonymity and disassociation, as evidenced by the advantage taken of their increased availability on the internet by malicious hackers and criminals, are heightened, of course. The opportunities for contributive, constructive, and conscientious interaction, equally heightened, are taken on in a responsible manner by the majority of ‘virtual citizens’ today. Identifying (an ongoing process) the nature of the substantive contextual differences, I look, as always, for the planners and builders who lead community growth. In this the differences are much more pronounced, not as much in terms of who these individuals are as in terms of the social fabric and the attendant dynamics.
Urban development relies on balancing a dynamic that includes lifestyle and value conscious residents, profit driven developers, traffic focused planners, vote driven politicians, civic minded citizens, and ecologically minded activists. In my personal experience of this process, although many individuals may recognize all these various motivations and agendas, few comprehend more than a basic summary of any position other than their own. The results are derived primarily out of negotiations between parties with apparently conflicting interests. In many cases there are more losers than winners, and urban re-development from which almost everyone benefits (and no one truly loses) is the exception rather than the rule.
On the internet, there is a founding development philosophy that is based on organic growth, human enabled but not specifically human directed. In my opinion, as healthy a philosophy as that was and is, there is a distinct need in this new society for more pro-active building, involvement and guidance from the best of us.
We have here the blessing of a free economy, where we can exchange ideas, information, goods and services, and free platforms where we can connect and socialize, albeit to a fairly limited extent so far. These free platforms are increasingly media sponsored, and the ongoing development of the medium is increasingly profit driven. At this point, the free vs paid argument has created an unfortunate conflict, cleaving the yin yang balance as strongly as Democrat vs Republican, or socialist vs capitalist, or liberal vs. conservative. This is not to say that we shouldn’t have differences of opinion and engage in spirited debate, which is a cornerstone of free society, but only that the debate itself is a thing distinct from the creation and availability of the commons where it takes place.
In a small town or village, open spaces, places for our children to play or for an open air concert to take place, usually appear to have been created by consensus, but in reality were mandated by traditional societal custom. Their development was typically led by the ‘town fathers’.
In cities, government takes the primary urban planning role by laying out master plans which delineate uses, densities, etc. Real estate developers push those envelopes, but they are naturally (being profit driven) primarily market driven. No real estate developer wants to build a 50 story complex of buildings where there is no traffic, population mass, or transportation access. The typical development process involves a quid pro quo, where, for example, roads, parks, land for schools, etc. are part of the developer’s cost of all those houses in the new subdivision.
On the web, we are individually self-governing. This is unprecedented in a highly populated setting. The early growth of the web saw a disproportionate number of porn sites and other unpleasant stuff, but then ‘new worlds’, through history, have often been settled in early days by criminals, carpetbaggers and the like. Today, as the population here continues to surge, the percentage of responsible citizens does as well.
We would do well, I believe, to think more toward building virtual networks that function in many ways like the best cities. To that end, a wider understanding of the interdependent organisms that are communities, as well as a fuller recognition of the requirements of self-government, can only benefit us all. Look at the ways in which community theory becomes practice on Wikipedia or eBay as well as the ways it might be applied in future.
The low barriers to business entry here have encouraged tremendous innovation and many great products, but the advances of technological complexity have also simultaneously narrowed the pool of larger scale innovators. There is a huge imbalance between the constituents as regards the development process. The core community does choose, every day, whether to address that directly or simply to leave it to market forces.
As populated as this place is becoming, it is still in some ways a giant shanty town. What amazing opportunities are here to be seized or not. Many of the opportunities are beyond the ability of any one individual to take on, but not beyond the ability of expanded communities.
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There is a lot online, both scholarly and conversational, but here are a couple of links for anyone completely new to human community theory:
This is just a timeline in pdf form:
HECOL 200 - Review of Historical and Contemporary Theories of Community
(HECOL is Human Ecology at the University of Alberta)
A summary of the Four Elemental Forms in the structure of social life in Alan Fiske’s Relational Model Theory.
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This past week, I started re-reading a book I discovered over 20 years ago. By the time I found Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), I was well and truly enraptured by the 3 dimensional mosaic of which great cities are composed, and was delighted to find a point of view so in sync with my own. This book, parts of which were first published as essays in the late 1950s, deals with cities as organic entities composed of areas and neighborhoods which thrive or decline based as much on human community dynamics as on their physical environs. Although the focus is on studying ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ neighborhoods for the purpose of informing urban planners, the book is full of observations about community needs, desires, and behavior that should, I think, make it of interest to most community theorists.
