Understanding Communities

The term 'community' similar to that of the term 'society' (as discussed previously) cannot be easily defined. Neither should it have to be. Whereas 'society' can in fact encompass everything from human to object behaviour and to an endless extent, a 'community' is already something more specific and only relevant in a specific context. We should not attempt define 'society' or the associations through an understanding of communities as, this too like 'society' is intangible. A community should be treated as a community how ever complex its associations are. 

Every community is different how ever similar its values are to another. To apply rules, politics design or structure to a series of communities is to completely discredit to notion that communities are collections of individuals with independent paradigms and subjective opinions. It is obviously completely impossible to understand every opinion of every individual within a community. This like the idea of 'society' is too broad but by taking large samples of communities a national hypothetical 'map' could be created representing political views, needs or behaviour as just a few examples on a localised thus accurate scale. 

The term society is usually only mentioned when an individual wants to shift a responsibility onto the 'masses'. To blame society is to blame the Nation and beyond through international associations. And, to what extent they continue cannot be defined. To blame a community though is to highlight a region or a collective of people. Thus creating the ability for us to target regions or collections more accurately. This in turn prevents us from inflicting expensive policies and design onto a national scale an to other regions where such implications are not relevant.

The idea of public spaces in my opinion highlights this perfectly. Public and common spaces by the nature of them tend to be very generic. Community centers for example tend to be empty rooms or shells of buildings. The ideology behind an empty community center surely would be fine as it should allow a community to change the space to their specific needs. This too like public parks, squares etc actually don't tend to shaped by communities. The are two reasons in my opinion for this. Firstly, legislation. The rules, planning and laws involved in making structural changes to a building, putting up signs or creating social furniture etc are so daunting they must deter the most committed of communitarian's. Secondly, the laziness of community representatives. The effort involved to conduct a democratic vote for new proposals is so great that this too is likely to deter the governing body or council from passing motions.   

Councils, the supposed representatives of geographically based communities tend to make decisions regarding public spaces under the justification they were democratically elected. 

Communities now tend to have few voices to forward proposals. This misconception here is that few people care. The idea of communities has become popular in the media and politics again, and hopefully this will encourage the motivation towards a community's well-being. Communities only tend to come together when they feel they are about to loose something; a park for development, a tree for a road, a post office and so on. If communities and individuals were engaged with initially, such fights would not need to occur. Communities would be brought together as a result of potential for new positive attributes rather than in defense of the negative.