THE COMMUNAL QUEST
Elizabeth Reader
March 5, 1997

I grew up in a military family. Which means I moved around a lot growing up. When people ask me where I'm from, my most honest answer is "everywhere and nowhere." My fondest memories are of the year I spent in a small town in Illinois, where my family lived six blocks from my grandparents and within thirty miles of our extended family.

My last few years living with my family prior to college were spent in Virginia Beach, a relatively large city of about 250,000 residents, many of them military personnel. My impressions of Virginia Beach were that it was a large, suburban sprawl, with subdivision upon subdivision of vinyl sided, plastic shuttered, fake Colonial houses. It really had no urban center or historic district or downtown, other than the Atlantic Avenue beach front strip largely devoted to tourists. Not only did the tourists give the city a transient feel, but so, too, did the city's military personnel that cycled through Hampton Roads on two year stints.

Ironically, I married someone with just the opposite experience. With the exception of his college years, my husband has lived in Winchester his entire life, and so has his extended family. Moving to Winchester in 1986 was, quite frankly, a shock to me. My initial impressions of Winchester as a charming, novel place gradually changed into a phase when I felt I'd taken up residence in a fish bowl. I couldn't be anonymous anymore. I had to be careful of what I said in public because, as one friend of mine put it, "even the sidewalks have ears in this town." Now that I've lived here for over ten years, I've grown to enjoy Winchester and appreciate the fact that it has a unique sense of community, unlike anywhere else I've lived.

I find the idea of community intriguing, maybe because I'm a rootless transplant. In our highly mobile, high- tech society, are more and more people feeling the sense of rootlessness, of placelessness, that I grew up with? Do people have an innate need to belong to a community, to feel part of a larger whole? Or does our strong sense of individualism constantly conflict with the need for community, which requires of us a commitment to both a physical location and to the emotional support of others? Can communities be created through thoughtful planning principles? Or do true communities need to evolve over time? Is it easier to destroy a community than to build one? And is the World Wide Web making the idea of physical community an arcane notion? Have central air conditioning, satellite television, and our dependence on the automobile destroyed what the front porch once fostered?

Most people would define community as a "support network." Schools, churches, and community service clubs are avenues by which people meet, form friendships, and connect with one another. I think we'd all agree that these networks are important to our well- being. Some psychologists contend that "well- connected" people live longer, healthier lives, and therefore they advocate interconnected systems of family, friends, and community to foster a sense of connectedness and belonging. They believe identity is partially molded through identifying with, and incorporating the qualities of, a larger group. They propose that many people have unexplained feelings of emptiness largely because we're social animals who must live, interact, and work within communities to feel fulfilled. 1

When Metropolis magazine recently surveyed architects, designers, educators, and activists about how they "define, build, seek, and strengthen" community, the respondents all agreed that community is an essential component of human life. Their consensus was that community provides "comfort, interaction, acceptance, and familiarity," and that it is founded in "participation, cooperation, and shared goals." Those who responded to the poll agreed that the concept of community is ubiquitous-- it's much easier to describe how it feels than to explain how it's fostered. And most believe the concept of community has changed over time. While their parents' generation defined community as the places where they lived or the circle of friends they played bridge with, their generation unanimously blames the mass exodus from the cities to the suburbs as the death blow to community. These respondents thought that the personal computer and the virtual world of cyberspace have changed their perceptions of community. 2 Perhaps their parents would say television had a similar affect on their generation.

While I think that most people generally have positive associations with the concept of community, London- based architect and critic Deyan Sudjic, in his essay entitled "The Myth of Community," takes the opposite stance. Sudjic contends that the communal order of urban organization is based on the now- defunct farming hamlet or fishing village, where the inhabitants all know one another, people don't stray far from home, and families all keep in touch. He takes issue with the presentation of community as the natural order of things, tampered with at society's peril. He scoffs that "recurring dream of community" is "the most cherished of contemporary myths," and derisively calls it a "fantasy that celebrates the corner shop, borrowing a cup of sugar from the neighbours, and all those other unimpeachable suburban virtues that range from motherhood to apple pie." He observes that, "In the same way that Ronald Reagan talked constantly about the importance he places on religion, without ever attending a regular act of worship,... so the idea of community as a desirable, but essentially abstract quality is much more powerful than its reality."

NEXT PAGE