re: What creates community?
From: John Major (jmajordayna.com)
Date: Tue, 18 Apr 95 08:32 CDT
As a new participant in one of our newest coho communities-in-the-makin',
Wasatch Cohousing in Salt Lake City, UT, I've been lurking on the list for a
while, just soaking it all in. But this latest thread has drawn me out,
because I've been asking myself "what creates community" for a long time. We
certainly won't come up with a single answer here - many things help, "that
which creates family", "common adversity" (John Barlow's phrase in a recent
piece about on-line 'communities'), and one of my favorites from a ten-year
old piece of Ann Herbert's, "living with people you wouldn't necessarily
*choose* to live with". The crucial brick in a community's foundation that
cohousing seems to have a special insight about, to my mind, is "working
together". 

Buzz Burrell wrote (in part):

>Another Factor - If one looks at communities world wide, probably the most
>common factor is not that they eat together, but that they work together.
>Literally; like they all grow rice or something.
>Work is not a factor in the cohousing model, where the community usually
>consists of commuters who drive off to work somewhere every day.

I beg to differ - that is a pretty narrow definition of work... Now, I'm not
living in cohousing yet, but it was quickly clear to me that I was getting
that special understanding of the strengths (and weaknesses!) of my future
neighbor's characters that community involves not from "bonding", but from
doing *real work* together. The "Meetings R Us" aspect of cohousing is a fine
place to find out how generous someone is with their time, how clear-minded
they are, how they function under stress, and so forth. And whatya know, you
can bond with people in the process as well.

The Construction-Agonistes scene is obviously going to lay the major portion
of that common work experience down (hey, and even provides the "common
adversity" element!), but what happens after you move in? Well, in suburbia,
what work does everyone do a little of every day? Mowing the lawn? I'd have to
say that the *evening meal* is one of the few intersections of daily, focused
effort. And as well, food is a locus of human pleasure, health, fun, and
spirituality, so it doesn't surprise me that (possibly by accident) cohousing
placed the evening meal in a high-profile spot. 

An' another thing - Buzz' observation about driving off to work doesn't do
justice to the folks that stay home and keep their homes running, or, as our
work lives change, stick around to telecommute. It is certainly true that the
"colonization of work" meant that we don't share much in that area, but
cohousing certainly makes it easier.

.Has anyone noticed how the phrase "it takes a whole village to raise a
child" has made it into mainstream culture by now? Talk about WORK - and there
does seem to be a consensus that cohousing is a good way to spread the effort
of raising little people with good hearts.

An' finally - writing from the heart of Mormon country, I was surprised not to
find anyone point out that shared religious beliefs are quite often a pillar
of the community in traditional societies. Certainly, my "majority culture"
Mormon neighbors seem to have a lot of community going, without having to
build developments around it - shared vision, shared work (Meetings R Us,
again...), shared rituals, etc. BUT - Utah is an artifact from the past, and I
won't go into the negatives of this kind of scene, except to say that I think
humanity is learning (ever so painfully slowly) that common vision based on
religion is an extremely DANGEROUS path, and maybe we have to find some other
way of bringing things together. (must have something to do with the "One True
Path" stuff in the human soul - "Well, CoHousing is the One True Path, isn't
it? ISN'T IT?....").

So, yeah, John G. is right, community is made by that which creates
interdependence - not a bad one-sentence declaration, really, but a tough one
to swallow for a culture that starts out with the "Declaration of
Independence"!

John Major

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