A Definition That Makes Sense to Me (FINALLY)

"Though similar to 'community' in its warm connotations, 'neighborhood' can be defined much more precisely...it is a subdivision of the city, scaled to the practical, physical social, and emotional needs of ordinary human beings" (Fleming 45). The neighborhood is the physical space where communities can be formed. And there are probably a lot of different communities within a neighborhood.

This helps me immensely since I used to think of a community as a purely physical or shared space, but reading Fleming has helped me move past that and think of community more as a feeling - positive or negative. Community is a purely human creation - I think. Although, I also think that it's natural for people to want to feel a connection to something.

It is interesting to note that communities are usually described positively. For example, the Bronzeville neighborhood in Chicago. "It was a place that also exhibited all the features of social organization - including a 'sense of community, positive neighborhood identification, and explicit norms and sanctions against aberrant behavior'" (Fleming 73). People always want a sense of community - well-defined social norms and a sense of belonging.

Later Fleming discusses integrating public housing residents into suburban areas (which are another whole mess), but "public housing residents apparently do not want to leave the central city, do not want to abandon their family, friends, and neighborhood to live among potentially hostile whites in automobile-dependent suburbs" (Fleming 123). No matter how "terrible" a neighborhood may be (due to various reasons), people still develop a sense of community. Which further reinforces my idea that community is a feeling.

I find the case of North Town Village very interesting. It is very artificial, forced community building. At least the developers realized that "simply putting residents side by side...would not be enough to promote community among them" (Fleming 137). They "solved" this problem by making a community covenant (Fleming 137) and with the Story Telling Project (Fleming 148). However, the community covenant still treated the low-income residents as "others." And they had to define language that would be used to describe low-income community members in a non-offensive manner. Couldn't they just call them residents like the "market-price residents"? At least they tried.

In reading this, I was thinking of ways that community could be negative even though it has such a positive connotation. I started thinking of online neighborhoods (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) that allow for communities that are potentially destructive to the members. These neighborhoods allow people with, for example, eating disorders to come together and share stories. This is not inherently harmful, but there is nothing and no one that really regulates these communities. Sure there is acceptable behavior, etc., but who is to say that people really follow it. So these communities develop into negative places because instead of sharing "positive" support, the members post tips and tricks about how to hide food, stave off hunger, and pictures of Holocaust victims for "Thinspiration."

So I'll relate this back to a community in a physical, rather than internet, neighborhood. There are neighborhoods where the community is formed by mutual terror. Like the north end of Flint. The social norms of the community are set by the lack of safety. So that is another more physical example of a negative physical community.

In general, I am just annoyed by urban redevelopment projects because they don't take into account the residents who actually live there. And in trying to create a community, they destroy one instead. Maybe it's not the "ideal" community (whatever that is), but it's a community.