Place, Space and Community
A laneway in Melbourne offers a rich visual and spatial environment away from urban traffic, well-suited for community interaction. Pedestrian passage promotes impromptu connections.
I'm a follower of Fr. Richard Rohr, and his organization puts out daily meditations that often resonate.
Today's meditation talks of about the importance of physical space and place to a community. The in-person contacts are important to building connections and well-being. A song for an architect/urban designer/planner's heart!
Community is essential to our survival and quality of life. Recent studies have demonstrate a strong link between one’s health and longevity and having a strong social connections - a community. There are also strong links between one’s mental and emotional health and one’s relationships, whether close or casual.
Community is a tool of transcendence, allowing us to feel belonging, security and joy.
Some of the needs for community contact may be met on-line, but the older structures in our brains - our “lizard brains” - will take thousands of years to adapt the emotional benefits of the personal connections that allowed us survival as tribes to on-line chat groups. For now, not the same, not even close.
We NEED the in-person social circles, and they are being rapidly and forcefully eroded by increased pressures in everyday life, social media, life on-line, pandemics, on-line commerce (we used to run into neighbors at the store), and crime/violence in public spaces. The meditation describes the difficulty of maintaining a community in today's rocket-paced time of immense change. In such circumstances, it is hard to reach out beyond an individual life's immediate needs.
It reminded me that the US in the 1870s-1890s was described the same way, as a time requiring high-speed adaptation to change -industrialization - in a way that was overwhelming to people, and took a big toll on the quality of community connections.
There was a crisis of democracy then, and another now.
Robert Putnam, the brilliant social researcher, would say that that era was the last time the US faced a breakdown in community coherence, similar to today. And, that grassroots efforts at building community - with neighbors, on your block, in your neighborhood - are the starting point to reverse the trend. (see his book The Upswing.)
Social media space can be a community as well - Facebook, Linked-In, Threads, etc. - when groups form that become reliable in membership and quality of exchange. Even better if an on-line relationship becomes a real-life one. Is there one of those in your life you might convert?
Keep doing this important work to build and connect with community, for your benefit and the world’s, and thank you.
Find the meditation here.
