Community fascinates me. Not just the idea of it, but the dynamics, and how those dynamics end up stoking or choking our collective efforts to be together. Having worked in a lot of different places, I’ve had opportunity to study community in action, at both its strongest and weakest, in all different contexts — economic, political, cultural — and have tried to identify patterns that lead to results.
I wrote about a series of these back in October. Not ways to create community, mind you, but ways to foster it. Ways that cities and towns can aid our instinctive urge to connect and co-exist in productive relationship.
It’s not about kumbaya or chamber of commerce photo ops. It’s about survival. I, together with a growing body of research, view the relative strength or weakness of community ties as an indicator, perhaps the most critical indicator, of resilience. Not unlike John Michael Greer who, in his handy post-industrial how-to, The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, asserts “the community, not the individual, is the basic unit of human survival. History shows that local communities can flourish while empires fall around them.”
Not a small deal. In short, our ability to keep on keepin’ on may, at its most fundamental levels, come down to how well we’re connected.
Corrosive forces
How to help build community up is one thing, but what about factors that tend to tear it down? What about the things that stand in the way of meaningful progress? Things that draw and lock us into perpetual and unproductive stasis?
Those are equally interesting. So today I identify the first of what will probably be more to come: Measuring success against impossible ideals rather than achievable goals.
This instinct is seemingly epidemic and unrelated to affluence. It plays out like this: Say your city, town, neighborhood or other collection of folks working together, accomplishes something. For example, let’s say it manages to get bike lanes installed on a primary route through town.
From my vantage point, which includes study of near-countless communities doing similar things, I’d see it as a huge win. I’d see something people should take great pride in and use to propel their momentum forward. After all, consider the likely dynamics involved: an all-powerful state DOT; the ability to secure funding; the personal agendas of city leaders; the challenges of allocating limited public space; adjacent residents confronted with the possibility of change; and the ever-present belief by most people that more car lanes equals less traffic.
Despite all that, each a formidable obstacle in and of itself, it got done. Yet, what do the corrosive forces have to say about it? Why, it’s a failure for any number of reasons. It’s just one route, rather than a network of bike lanes. They ended up just four and a half feet wide rather than the more ideal five. They displaced driving space or include segments with sharrows.
Whatever the reason, the underlying position remains the same: Even for those ideologically in favor of the effort, the project is a failure because it falls some degree short of perfect. As though perfect were ever a possible outcome.
This is ludicrous. People making the conscious decision to work together, to put their differences aside in pursuit of shared interests, to find initiatives with the potential to improve quality of life (and, with it, economic, social and/or environmental performance), and to navigate obstacles to actually get something done, constitutes success. Grand success. Why? Because it so greatly exceeds what can be reasonably expected in the course of the day-in, day-out operations of most places.
I’ve seen plenty of places where, for a host of reasons, nothing ever gets better. Day to day operations are managed, people go about their business, yet no investments in the future viability of the community ever seem to materialize.
This is what one should reasonably expect to happen in Anytown, USA. Thus, this is the bar against which proactive efforts should be measured.
If your city or town is getting things done, consider yourself lucky. It’s a lot more rare than you think. And if you possess some particular insight into how such initiatives could be even better, leave the comfort of your armchair and get in the game.
It’s actually quite simple: If the efforts around you are lacking and you know how to improve them but fail to contribute, the problem isn’t those working to make things happen.
It’s you.
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What a great observation, Scott. Incremental progress needs to be encouraged.
I have one counterpoint to offer. Small victories should be celebrated, but in the battle for livable communities advocates are beset on all sides by the forces you mention. Lauding that imperfect bike lane as anything but a starting point sets the stage for political inaction. If the mayor is in it for the photo op, you better give it to him with conditions, and if he doesn’t follow through it may be time to find a new one.
Where I live things are getting better because they must get better. We will not survive as a city if we stand still. Twenty years of activism has led to a Bicycle Master Plan, a slow growing network of bike lanes, and a few growing urban neighborhoods that have become destinations for local college students and young professionals.
Yet we must put those achievements in context. Two or three neighborhoods do not make a thriving city. In my neighborhood, that destination is literally a single block of bars and restaurants. There is so much left to do, and so far yet to go.
Simply acting is not enough. We cannot be satisfied by half measures. While poverty exists, while abandoned houses provide shelter for gangs, while children are poisoned by the paint in their homes, while kids are gunned down in the street or robbed at gunpoint in their homes, while there is still work to be done we must not be satisfied.
Only by providing a vision of a city worth fighting for will we bring our friends and neighbors off the sidelines and into the fight.
Albeit not new, this is IMHO true.
Also check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy
Thanks for the link, Nat. Can’t say I was familiar with much about Kohr personally but Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful” is a wonderful book. -SD
So, communities should settle for shitty bike lanes that don’t form part of a network that cater mainly for existing cyclists (predominantly adult males)? Rubbish infrastructure lasts for 15 to 20 years, robbing whole generations of children their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to move safely and freely around their own communities.
Why do some people act as if the Internet and the Netherlands have never been invented? No wonder the Anglosphere is so far behind Europe on just about every measure of public health, social equity and economic resilience. Why can’t these people swallow their pride and admit that some countries have been building good community infrastructure for decades and that we should copy them?
We know that some things will achieve what they set out to do and some won’t. Build only the former or you are just wasting everybody’s time and effort, as well as destroying their incentive to participate in further community efforts to improve living conditions.
Sorry if this came across as though it were a post about design, Jim. To be clear, I don’t think anyone is really under the delusion that our infrastructure issues throughout the U.S. are the result of us not knowing how to access best practices. Even the most challenged communities are bright enough to figure out Google.
In my experience, ours are problems of community dynamics and political will, which are in no way comparable to the Netherlands and cannot be solved with further information and/or angst about design. To my view, we need to work the community we have, warts and all. And as we stumble through the series of baby steps it takes most communities to build a proper coalition and really get momentum, it’s our choice where we draw the line in terms of what constitutes a win. You seem inclined to hold out for perfection. My experience suggests otherwise, for all the reasons spelled out above.
I’m not talking about places where the hard work of cultural agreement has already been done. Most Americans live in places where proactive change, especially as it relates to the built environment, is a difficult and — especially at first — often thankless path. Those folks are the real champions. If we don’t support and join in their efforts, we might as well be writing those places off.
… And I don’t think Scott was talking about settling. That “shitty bike lane” might be a community’s first infrastructure action in decades that focused on people instead of cars. That shift in priorities is worth celebrating all by itself! But nobody said after the party we just pack our things and go home. It’s a win, and a win that we can build on to win more.