MagazineEssay

Community (as a space of possibilities)

Ezio Manzini, Politecnico di Milano, Milaan, Italië

Discussions on sustainability and resilience (and on the social innovation required to achieve them) frequently refer to the term “community”. Even though everybody knows that the communities of today (i.e. communities in a highly connected world) are quite different from those of the past, there are not so many shared ideas of what we really mean when we use this term. My ideas are the following:

1.Contemporary communities are grids of social ties that individuals can activate in different ways, choosing where, how, when and for how long to allocate their personal resources (in terms of time, attention, skills, relational availability). This description indicates two main characteristics: firstly, unlike the pre-modern traditional communities, which were not chosen by their own members, the contemporary ones exist by choice. Secondly, unlike the twentieth century intentional communities, which were based on strong ideologies calling for exclusive affiliation and promising a strong identity, the contemporary ones are multiple, non-exclusive and demand no special level of commitment. In other words, those who participate in this kind of community are not looking for a ready-made solution or identity. On the contrary, they are looking to build their own solutions and identity by making their own personal choices among different proposed options.

2. Contemporary communities are not to be seen as structured organizations, but as spaces of possibilities: networks of people and places offering opportunities for expressing ideas, solving problems, opening routes towards new perspectives.
It follows that, from the point of view of potential members, contemporary communities are qualified by the density and variety of meaningful interactions they offer. In operative terms, these meaningful interactions take different forms, for instance: conversations, services and collaborations. Each of them can be evaluated, from the community members’ point of view, in terms of collaborative attitude and relational intensity, meaning the request for time, attention, skills and long-term commitment, for the first (the collaborative attitude), and trust, empathy and friendliness, for the second (the relational intensity).

3. Given that a community is a space of possibilities (and not an organization), it cannot be designed and realized as a single entity. On the contrary, it must be built piece-by-piece, proposing motivations for encounters and creating conditions to make them possible and permit them to evolve towards new social forms.
It follows that, for contemporary communities, the expression “community building” must be taken literally: communities are to be built starting from their molecular elements. That is, from the different kinds of encounters between people and between people and places that are, to all intents and purposes, their building blocks. Therefore, community building implies working at two levels: offering encounter possibilities oriented towards different goals and accessible with different kinds of commitment, and creating enabling structures to produce an environment where these encounters may exist, last in time and be easily replicated.

4. Building a resilient community means increasing diversity, redundancy and ability to learn from experience. This can be done by supporting collaboration between different people, valorising these diversities and creating conditions for an inclusive social cohesion. This means:

  • proposing themes, programs and projects of interest to socially and culturally different people.
  • proposing activities that can be performed with different levels of commitment, meaning with different collaborative attitudes and relational intensity.
  • realizing systems which enable the existence and development of a multiplicity of non-planned, auto-produced activities.
  • realizing artefacts capable of aggregating groups of people and positively influence their behaviours.
  • realizing digital and physical spaces where non-planned encounters could easily happen, creating more friendly, open and fertile environments.