Rebuilding the Community Fabric for the Information Age
A Community is not created by the simple proximity of its parts;
rather, it emerges from their integration.
- John Sanger
Community is such an interesting word, both a noun and an adjective. In recent years, the adjective is more common, i.e., community schools, community policing, community parks etc. We all live in a community, but do we have a common understanding of what it is?
· Do we recognize that we have virtual and physical communities?
· How many communities are we part of?
· And the big question: “How many of those communities are segments of a larger community that we think of as our “Community”?
· Does society function, at least at the physical level, better when these segments collaborate around a set of common goals or a central vision?
· Do we exist in the integrated or proximity model?
· Finally, what determines our community boundary: a political jurisdiction or a dynamic, socio-economic service area?
In our view, a community is either a collection of services and opportunities that are in proximity to you, or it is an integration of those services and opportunities based upon a common socio-economic orientation which provides access to those items. For example:
· Neighborhood level- often defined by the distance our children are allowed to travel without a lot of parental concern.
· Service Center level- defined by that cluster of things that we use routinely, i.e., a park, our regular stores, a coffee shop, an employer, a school etc.
· Regional Level- Consisting of those things to which we generally default to but on a non-daily basis. A shopping mall, a cultural or athletic event, a vacation spot, our home town.
Before the Industrial Revolution most people lived in an environment that provided all of these services within the same physical footprint. However, as technology, transportation and specialization occurred, the three levels of community cited above, emerged but in a very unstructured way. Neighborhoods shrunk as we fear for our children; big box stores eliminated the store-on-the-corner; and the local baseball team is now Major League Baseball.
Jeremy Rifkin’s Book, End of Work, discusses the three sectors in society: the public, the private and the community sectors. He asserts that the Community Sector role is to be the fulcrum that balances the excesses of the other two sectors. Given the size of government and the excesses of major industries, it is easy to assert that the Community Sector no longer exists or at least is proving to be powerless. Now at the cusp of the Information Age, the policies of the Industrial Age have proven incapable of addressing the Digital Divide, environmental challenges, challenges of equity and access as well as maintaining a common belief in our historic national values.
The Industrial Mindset has pushed community to near extinction, but the need for it has never been greater. If community is worth saving, can it be done? The answer is yes, if the community so wishes. Community alone controls the vote and the power of the consumer dollar!
The Information Age provides the tools to rebalance society, integrate the rural and urban economies, and fundamentally redefine the very structure of community. Instead of static boundaries defined by geology and pioneer surveyors, community must hierarchically and dynamically, define itself based upon socio-economic principles.
The Smart Region and the Distributed City Model defines this structure. Our nonprofit, Telecommuter Resources, has spent the last 25 years building the implementation tools to achieve a strategic solution to many of our problems of today. They are ready for deployment.
See our website: Smart Regions or
Buy our Book on Amazon: "Slaying the Status Quo"
Our next essay will be “Gain Consensus” which will introduce the e-Consensus tool that provides the method for obtaining meaningful consensus among the members of a diverse community.