The news from America is that I'm forestalled!

In reply to "054. Community as the next Status Good?", Bjorn Skogquist and Karen Watters Cole have written as follows

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BS

Community is already being packaged as a status good all over America. In the Midwest, it is achieved through a vehicle called "Smart Growth". Out East, it is called "New Urbanism". Various regional governments are pushing these concepts as a way to solve regional issues through creating more density, and thus less sprawl. Whatever it is called it involves incorporating mixed uses in new developments and building, not by spreading out in a mall like fashion, but by building up, often placing residential use above second floor offices and that above commercial shops or restaurants.

What has resulted after slightly less than a decade is that some do it well and some do not. However it gets done, it is sold by herding local residents into a series of open meetings to talk about problems and perceptions of their part of town and then selling the finer points of more dense development of a certain price point. People mostly go along with it because there is a healthy portion of words like 'vision', 'community', and 'long-term solution' used to describe the development. Blighted areas to be developed are often called the 'heart', and so a new development in your city might be called, "The heart of Bath project".

Where these projects are actaully being done is in small towns like your Thornbury, just up the road a few clicks from Bristol. So, a bunch of city leaders, craving more tax base, would gather all the people in Thornbury and ask them about all the problems they have, and sell a couple million pound development as a solution. They would say, "We're fixing the heart of Thornbury!" This all smacks of Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man, who suckers people in River City, Iowa to believe that all the problems in the world can be solved by creating a boy's marching band.

Anyway, back to status. I believe that not only for those that will live in these new developments, but also for those that live in the same community, it is a status good to have an urban area to call downtown, even if your city is only 25 or 30 years old and, for all practical intents and purposes, a suburb. In America, why go patronize someone else's run-down far-away urban core when you can build one in your own back yard?

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KWC

There are many indications that a renewed sense of community is indeed emerging, both in economic and social terms, that is, both in infrastructure like towns built for greater not less human interaction and in human connectivity, manifested in the many layers of interest in social networks old and new. Political community incorporates both of the former, and I won't go into that now since you get a lot of political input from me already.

As to the Vermont example of equal property taxes across the board to encourage better education for all, Vermont is joined by Texas, which passed its own so-called Robin Hood laws in the late 80s, I believe. Of course, Highland Park in Dallas, and River Oaks in Houston grumbled about sharing and the injustice of it all, but the problem in school funding was beginning to affect not just local communities but the integrity of the whole (state) so that people looked beyond their own provincial borders to vote this into place. Texas, unlike Vermont, has a substantial minority population, which contributed both to the tension of the debate and the perception of the intended consequences.

Yes, judicial enforcement of laws society agrees are necessary and good for perpetuity are often taken with large doses of resentment. But we must look beyond our own immediate spheres, we must utilize that higher state of consciousness, or transitional ego, that is sometimes just as essential than fight or flight survivalism.

In America, we will always struggle with the mighty historical question of one nation or 50 states, and the fact that there are 50 of them makes it more complicated to apply lessons from one to the rest without bumping up against those incessant questions of states' rights, regionalization, local control and individual freedom.

If land and natural resources were still in unlimited abundance, we would undoubtedly still pursue pioneer expansionism in all things; as it is, we are beginning to realize, as did Europe before us, that social and legal structures must change to accommodate the very real limits of sustainability -- oops, survival. The transition is likely to be uneven and traumatic as we leave behind the pioneer mentality and evolve to something else, something hopefully more mature and less destructive. There is reason for optimism that we can retain the best of our past traditions and incorporate new concepts, technology and science to accommodate the necessity of existing in a smaller world with more people on it sharing diminishing resources. We just have to find the will to do it.

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