Re: shared experience/(was New Urbanism...) | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
From: Paul Barton-Davis (pbdOp.Net) | |
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 1997 12:23:00 -0500 |
Kevin Wolf of N Street wrote: >N Street has been around for ten years. Rob and I have been talking about the longevity issue privately. I will clarify my comments here by noting that although I consider it a worthy accomplishment for an intentional community to survive 10 years, I do not consider it long term. Long term for me means communities that survive across generations, across economic and agricultural change, certainly outliving any of the founders. We don't have too many examples of such communities outside of those inspired by various religious beliefs. >I agree with Rob though that the >people and the relationships they forge are fundamental. One of the many >things we've learned over time here is that the new people moving in >are one of the best things happening in our community. It is interesting that you say this the context of a discussion of the importance of "shared experience". Clearly, flux and a sense of shared experience are not mutually exclusive, but you can't have them both to arbitrary extents. Whatever benefit comes from a history of shared experience is mitigated by the flux of people. Or am I missing something ? I only offered a retort on this point because I think it important that we try to construct/discover living arrangements that can outlast the founders' "shared experience" and continue to offer new members the chance to (re)discover the same and/or other things again and again and again. This is why I think that successful small towns and villages are important models, because they have, somehow, done just that. Its true that they don't offer the level of interaction that most people expect of cohousing, but they can tell us something about the problems that cohousing as a long term living pattern might face and offer us some ideas for how to get around them. I don't think that we can afford endless, even if metaphorical, barn raisings to build and sustain communities. --p
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