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BUILDING COMMUNITY ORGANICALLY

An article by Alan Heeks

First published in Caduceus Magazine, Issue 55

To create community, do you first build a group of people with a vision and values, or do you build a place which helps people grow together? Much of the opinion from intentional communities says, start with the people. But some recent projects suggest that bricks first can be a good way up the mountain.

Of course, either path can get you to the goal. But it is useful to realise that there are two paths, and to see the benefits and drawbacks each offers. I came to this question with a prejudice that you have to start with the people. It has been liberating and exciting to find a strong case for a different way, and to realise the different kinds of community these paths can build.

My interest in community has grown through my role as founding trustee of an educational charity, The Wessex Foundation, which has helped create an organic farm and small community at Magdalen Farm Centre in Dorset. My first book, The Natural Advantage, grew from this experience: I am now exploring how to fulfil the principles of organic growth, which includes community, in social enterprise and in the building sector.

The focus of this article is on residential community, in the broad sense: a place where people live with some degree of shared lives and communal facilities. This definition is deliberately broad enough to span from vision led, intentional communities to co-housing where shared values are implicit, not mandated.

For most of the intentional communities I know, such as The Findhorn Foundation, the people-first route has been the way: it is often bumpy but it is well-tried and documented. Builders of the Dawn, one of the best manuals on intentional community, takes people first as a given. Its chapter with guidelines for building communities starts with the need for clear, shared vision and purpose to animate the group, and also highlights the need for common spiritual practice, solid relationships among group members, and a good process for conflict resolution. Because this route is well known, I will give more time to describing the alternative.

Beyond Philanthropy

Is the bricks-first route to community any different from the utopian model villages of the 18th and 19th centuries, or almshouses from earlier centuries? These were mostly philanthropic: it was the rich providing for the needy, whether sweated factory hands or the old and infirm. What’s now emerging in Britain and America is a form of social enterprise: eco-social housing development. At its best, it combines the benign side of business (freedom of choice, speed of action, clarity) with a holistic view of sustainability and an empowering approach to the disadvantaged.

The kind of community such eco-developments can create is not full-on intentional community: it will not have such closeness of interaction, interdependence and shared values. But then, intentional community is a steep and demanding path which is unlikely to suit most people. What is exciting about the bricks-first approach is that it offers qualities of community which many people aspire to and could realistically hope to reach through this route. To illustrate this, let’s look at a couple of examples.

BedZed

The Beddington Zero Energy Development in south London is a new-build project on a brown field site. It is a social enterprise which aims to cover its costs, deliver social benefits for both its residents and the wider neighbourhood, and demonstrate full sustainability (zero carbon emissions). The quality of thinking in this project, the way it has been funded, and the high interest from mass media are all encouraging signs that this could be the shape of things to come.

BedZed is being built and managed by one of Britain’s largest housing associations: it includes houses for sale at a profit alongside affordable-rent houses for low-income occupiers, including nurses and police. The communal facilities include a shop, café and crèche: these were chosen in consultation with the wider neighbourhood, to help BedZed integrate and contribute to its locality.

Many other design features will encourage community, such as work spaces as well as homes, a pool of electric vehicles to minimise car ownership; and keeping roads and parking to the edges, favouring pedestrians at the centre. The feasibility studies for this project were funded by two charities. The landowner, the London Borough of Sutton, took the bold and still unusual step of selling for less than the highest offer. They did so after commissioning a study to put a monetary value on the environmental and other benefits which the BedZed plan offered.

The Living Village Trust

The Living Village Trust, founded by Bob Tomlinson, is one of the pioneers of eco-development in Britain. Bob has impressed me as someone who has explored and pondered the link between community and the built environment really thoroughly. Over several years, his research has ranged from commercial developments (both the nice and the nasty) to full intentional communities in Britain, America, New Zealand and elsewhere.

He found two main problems in the intentional community approach: "one is that, when the Guru or in some cases The Common Enemy no longer is present in an intentional community then they tend to fragment. The other is what happens to the second generation – who are bound to rebel against anything that their parents signed up to and will want to break the rules. Other more practical problems were identified in unconventional ownership arrangements inhibiting inward investment into new buildings and difficulties in individuals leaving a community, having invested time and capital into a common ownership project."

In exploring alternatives to this, Bob came to realise that his own local town of Bishops Castle in Shropshire offered the answer. "Trying to think of communities that worked well ‘naturally’ the obvious was glaring – Bishops Castle. Here is a community that is robust, relaxed, good fun and has been around for 2000 years or so - warts and all. The higgledy piggledy houses are of a human scale, detailed and interesting and everything is within walking distance. It has grown slowly and organically over the years".

So instead of building a complete, self-contained community from scratch, Bob is exploring the idea of eco-developments of 30-50 homes which themselves have a sense of community, but which are part of a larger existing community too. He is well advanced with The Wintles, to be built on the edge of Bishops Castle, and is already receiving many approaches from land owners and local authorities wanting to apply these ideas elsewhere.

A profound influence in the development of Bob’s vision has been the work of Christopher Alexander. His remarkable book A Pattern Language, explores what appeals to the human heart and spirit about certain buildings, and spells out what elements create a sense of well-being, belonging and community in a place.

Bob Tomlinson’s view is that "you can’t pre-specify the values of a community: they have to grow out of the place once it is built." What is exciting about The Wintles is the way it uses the principles in A Pattern Language to encourage that process. This book lists 253 patterns which are cross-referenced to help you create anything from a city to a new front porch. Here is one example.

House Cluster: land and homes immediately around houses is of special importance. Focus of neighbourly interaction. 8 to 12 houses as a rough but identifiable cluster. Common land shared by the cluster. Open endedness and overlapping among clusters. Access to others without feeling like a trespasser. Cluster must be owned and maintained by constituent households (deed to one home carries with it part ownership in the cluster to which the home belongs; and this in turn carries with it part ownership in the neighbourhood made up of several clusters.

Refining meaning

The word community is now used in so many ways that we may question if it still has meaning. Part of this may be ‘chexploitation’, commercial hijacking, but mostly I see the word community used because it’s an acceptable term for many needs of many people, spiritual and emotional as well as material. So let’s sift through and refine some of these meanings, not throw out the concept. Here are a few of the needs which people may look to community to address:

So what kinds of community can address such issues as these? Intentional community is not a practical model for most people, but has a vital role to play, as a hothouse where new ideas can be hatched and tried. There’s also a need for a kind of planting out stage where these new-fangled seedlings try for sheltered growth before the full blast of the mainstream. This is where bricks-first communities have a role.

Summing Up

With apologies for the drastic simplification, here’s a summary of the two major routes to community explored in this article.

There has been remarkably high interest in these and other pioneering developments from people in general, the media, local authorities, and others. Let’s hope that this is indeed the shape of homes to come: it could make a great contribution to many of the issues we are facing in these times.

References

Builders of the Dawn by Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson, Book Publishing Co, US
BedZed www.bedzed.org.uk
The Living Village Trust: www.livingvillage.com e-mail:
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander and others, Oxford University Press, NY ISBN 0-19-501919-9

For information on Alan Heeks’ writings and community ideas, see www.thenaturaladvantage.com and www.living-organically.com
Alan can be contacted at: or 01747 835835