Community

[radegund]

inannajones has a great discussion of community going on. My contribution ballooned, so I decided to put it here instead.

When I was nine we moved from a pedestrianised terrace of tiny Corporation houses in Glasthule to a much posher house in Blackrock. The former was full of community spirit - with long-term residents, lots of kids, shared local activities etc. - and although my family were outsiders there for all sorts of reasons, it was a really great place to be a kid in. There was much less of that in Blackrock - not none, but certainly nothing like in Glasthule.

Probably because of this one experience, I think of this largely as a socio-economic phenomenon: community seems likely to be stronger where people have less material wealth. (The ideal capitalist set-up, of course, is to have everyone living alone, sharing nothing and thus each needing one of everything.) On Clanbrassil Street the other week I saw a sight that shot me back twenty years (gasp): two small girls wearing one skate each, lurching hand in hand along the pavement.

However, I'm interested in what gothwalk says in his post about the thriving community spirit in Hollybank, because that's not exactly in a deprived area. Maybe it's a historical thing: our generation grew up with different assumptions from those of our parents, and so we don't form communities as naturally as we might have twenty years ago.

I'm all for the intentional community thing, needless to say. Living with a dear friend has been a pretty solidly positive experience for niallm and me. I like the idea of sharing skills and facilities more widely, too - and I'd be interested in investigating more formal arrangements such as a LETS, or even shared ownership of a large house. (In Dublin? Dream on...)

Comments

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

What is a LETS?

[radegund.livejournal.com]

Local Economic Trading System.

I've never been involved in one, but if I understand correctly it bypasses the money economy by means of a zero-sum barter system. You join the community by getting into "debt" (i.e. accepting goods or services from a member), and then you trade using LETS-specific credits. At regular intervals the system is balanced - everyone has to return to zero.

That doesn't sound quite right, but it's something along those lines. Isolde ran one in Trinity a few years ago, but I don't think it's extant.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Something like a co-operative, only, er, not?

My folks were in a co-op in Camolin. We raised chickens, for the most part, and visited the co-op pigs up the road on a regular basis. I believe my father may also have done woodworking stuff for the group, but since he is in fact a woodworker, that may be a myth.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

This is a large house.

;-)

Just pointing out...

The Irish Times has a series on the new commuter belt in the outer-Dublin counties, and one of Kathy Sheridan's surprising discoveries is that the cliche of the two yuppies crippled with a huge mortgage and a huge commute, and no time for anything but picking up the sleeping kids from the creche at nine followed by a frozen pizza, doesn't hold true. People are building communities, against horrible odds, in places like Dunleer, and especially the kids who are born there love it and wouldn't have life any other way. Teenagers hate living 60 miles from town with no transport; but then, traditional Irish communities haven't really had much time for independent-minded teenagers anyway.

[radegund.livejournal.com]

This is a large house.

No, no, you don't understand. I know it's a "large" house, but I mean large, as in LARGE.

Laaaarrrrge.

Large like elephants and oak trees. Think Ailesbury, Wellington, Raglan. Think Marlay. That kind of large. (And for a lot more than three people, obviously.)

Don't mind me, I'm just being silly.

The stuff about communities forming despite it all is heartening, but we've all heard horror stories to the contrary as well...

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

Well, from what I can see from the articles, there are no "towns" in a lot of these places to speak of. (I'm thinking of a good friend of mine who lives in Ongar, a "village development" without a village on the borders of Co. Meath.)

To generalise like Frank McDonald for a bit, in some ways Irish culture seems to favour the kind of loose community that is generated around a horrible, bland, mindless estate. Think of the one-off housing development trend: for whatever reason, very many Irish people (or at least, very many heterosexual, house-buying, children-having Irish people) don't feel comfortable with too close a community, and get very twitchy at the thought of sharing property. We have an incredibly car-dependent culture, which is of course fuelled by the housing estate phenomenon. While both estates of bland boxes and car dependency can be put down to planning corruption to a certain extent, I still think that people here love the kind of privacy you get with a half-acre garden and an SUV. Maybe Ireland is really a bit nearer Boston than we Europeans think.

[ailbhe]

I'm part of a group of people who make a distinct point of moving near to one another. It's all about to explode, of course, since one household has to move to Canada to care for an ailing parent and one household hasn't been able to buy anything suitable within realistic walking distance, but it exists. And there's a larger network slightly farther afield.

It takes a hell of a lot of work, though; once to make sure that you know someone before you decide where to live, and once to make sure that you get to know someone new where you live, and ongoing after that to maintain and develop those. I hate maintain and develop - it's hard work for me - but I will do it for people I actually want to have in my life.

We call it the "African Village" theory of living, because some of the people in it aren't quite "chosen family".