Universal Note
Finding richness in community
By Gian-Carlo Carra
Across North America, and right here in Calgary, the notion of innovation in “community” is becoming a pretty big deal. Within the world of city-making, organizations representing the development industry are telling their members that the consumer is craving community, and the market is mobilizing to respond.
Correspondingly, the City of Calgary is currently trying to figure out how to incorporate the public input it received from the Imagine Calgary process, in which thousands of Calgarians contributed to a 100-year vision for our city and overwhelmingly requested a move towards what the mayor has termed “complete communities.” Meanwhile, local filmmakers are producing works such as Radiant City and Inglewood: Struggle for Community—each examining community not only from the perspective of what we want, but in terms of what we’ve lost to suburbanization over the last 60 years.
“Community” has to be today’s most equivocated term. More invocation than description, it is a catch-all that obscures rather than clarifies the complexity of human social dynamics in the physical world. We all can (and do) claim simultaneous membership in many “communities” that range from small to large, closed to open, homogeneous to diverse, and—a particularly confusing circumstance of our day—place-based to virtual. But does this meaningfully address the essence of what we’re all supposedly craving?
I believe society is in the slow-motion process of rejecting the failed social experiment, financial house-of-cards, and ecological disaster that is postwar suburbia and instead gravitating towards the sustainable civic richness hinted at by the increasingly ubiquitous invocations of “community.” I’m not just talking about the socio-historical “neighbours counting on each other,” or the physically grounded, lifestyle-branded “places that feel like ‘home’”—although these are important. In my work and public service, the definition of community I’ve embraced is based on its helpfulness in overcoming the suburban-sprawl machine and achieving the ultimate goals of sound urban design—which is to say a renaissance of grassroots-empowered, democratic, civic society.
Any helpful definition of community must be as rooted in the physical environment as it is in social dynamics—we need to get out of our cars and build our city in such a way as to encourage more interaction between all Calgarians. The North American ideal of community involves a dynamic quest for equilibrium amongst the diverse members of our pluralistic society—Calgary is perched on a tipping point between embracing the challenge of our growing diversity on the one hand, and retreating into suburban ghettos and enclaves on the other.
The fundamental communal purpose of survival in search of prosperity has been lost in our age of abundant cheap energy and society has atomized into insular, self-indulgent pursuits. I’m fearful that unless we willingly reconnect with such fundamentals, increasing energy scarcity will force our collective hand on less congenial terms. And I assert that community absolutely depends on a rejection of consumer-based governance, and a return to a citizen-based democracy built on the disinterested individual’s embrace of the common good—empower the citizenry with the responsibility to determine the future of their communities—that’s when you’ll truly see innovation at work.