Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: the meaning of community

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

Joani Said:
>Rob, you said you don't see a lot of "community" developing in cohousing, and
>that you think that "community" develops independently of site design. In my
>mind you are seeing "community" much too narrowly.

You are right, I do define "community" very narrowly for the purposes 
of describing the difference between social contact and relationship 
commitment.  I would never claim this definition is "right" only that 
is my way of clarifying the difference between social contact and 
relationship.  Nor would I measure any community other than my own 
against such a relationship definition of community.

I have expressed what I have heard others in cohousing complain about, 
a lack of feeling of "community" in their developments. I have heard 
this now from people in 5 existing cohousing groups.  What people have 
told me is that they feel the relationships in their development are 
sort of superficial and shallow and this is somehow less than they had 
hoped for.  It is certainly not up to me to define community for anyone 
else but myself, and I continually find that the word "community" is 
like the word "love", in that it may have numerous definitions.

What I react strongly to is architects who say things like, "this 
design builds community".  I tend to get annoyed by this, especially 
when the architects clearly confuse social contact, with community.  
Now maybe in their lexicon, social contact IS community and thus I 
should  just chill out.  For some reason, it bugs me, I guess I feel it 
sort of cheapens the term community to use it to refer to social 
contacts and not real relationships.    Certainly  friendly social 
contact could be called "community" and such contact could certainly 
lead someday to real commitment to relationship which I think of as 
"community".  My hang up I guess, don't mean to offend or try to 
dictate, just trying to clarify what I see as a crucial difference in a 
commonly used term.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood.