A Community of Place
"To be sure, it is not true that there is no grace in the suburbs; nor is it true that there are no communities in the suburbs. Such communities as do exist however tend not to be communities of place; and they are communities that effectively disenfranchise that significant percentage of the population that at any given moment is too young, too old, too poor, or too infirm to drive an automobile."
Philip Bless from Civic Art and the City of God: Traditional Urban Design and Christian Evangelism
Josiah Q. Roe | By Josiah Roe | 3:03 PM
Comments
What a cool article. I just picked up a book that would provide a great supplement to this New Urbanism called _The Poetics of Space_ by Gaston Bachelard. It is a meditation on the phenomenology of everyday habitation.
Posted by: paul at July 18, 2005 3:46 PM
It's true that we've become increasingly a-geographic. I'm not so sure this is a bad thing. It certainly offends traditional sentiments that I tend to share, but when it comes down to it, I can't think of a reason why I should know the people that live next door if the only connection we share is physical proximity. I'd like to see an argument about that.
Posted by: ryan at July 18, 2005 4:09 PM
Josiah, thanks for the link. I've been appreciating your thoughts on this and related issues.
Posted by: nick at July 18, 2005 4:16 PM
ryan - there are oh so many reasons you "should" know the people who live next door literally and metaphorically. unless you simply don't subscribe to an existance that is essentially about some larger purpose including reaching out, helping a stranger, being an open generous person on this earth... and stuff along those lines.
Posted by: mary at July 18, 2005 4:24 PM
Thanks for the article!
Posted by: mark at July 18, 2005 4:32 PM
Nice post, Josiah. You know, Lemmon is tight with some of the New Urbanist guys in Milwaukee. Good fellows, I'm told.
Did you see the article that your PCA buddies published on this topic in byFaitha couple of months back? Online version here.
Posted by: Derek at July 18, 2005 5:41 PM
A voice speaking the ideas popularized by James Howard Kuntzler to the Evangelical church? Great idea! Thanks for the link Josiah.
Posted by: Rob Hatch at July 18, 2005 9:46 PM
mary: interesting rhetorical exhortations, but not really any specific reasons why geographic proximity is significant on any non-accidental level.
Posted by: ryan at July 19, 2005 1:16 PM
Ryan, it nearly impossible to match both the breadth and depth of the "love" that can occur when people spend significant portions of their lives together in a number of different contexts: work, home, church, school, etc. in a brute "date" or "stuff" level, there's simply more interpersonal material to work with and build on if you work with them, live next door to them, your children are educated with theirs, and you worship together.
Better yet, the best kind of community, the best kind of love, is that which is bread out of unavoidable conflict and tension. It encourages integrity & longsuffering-ness. You can't cuss your co-worker out 'cause later that night you're going to see him while taking the trash out, or your kids are going to ask to go over and play with his, or your wife and his wife are at a book club together.
It's both quantitatively and qualitatively a scenario far more conducive to and far more akin to the type of "love" and "love your neighbor" and "be united" call that we have then incidental, geographically isolated, momentary friendships and community that are so common.
To break it all down, you gotta BE with people to love em more, and geographic proximity is huge way to BE with them, something that cannot be approximated elsewhere.
Posted by: JosiahQ at July 19, 2005 1:31 PM
