Re: shared experience/(was New Urbanism...)
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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