Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Communities without Commons

Take Exit “X”, drive for about 10 minutes and then if you make a right turn there’s just our new “community Y”… a great luxurious living with lots of greenery and safety. Or just a few miles or kilometers away from the urban jungle and you are in your enclosed haven of shining highrises: community “Z”, with private pools, golf courses and all modern facilities that makes your world a picture perfect one.

In recent times we are increasingly becoming accustomed to hearing about, viewing and living in such communities. Although such “patterns” first emerged in the developed nations, by far conspicuously in the United States, today the phenomenon remains no more restricted to them. Countries such as China and India are increasingly and proudly embracing such sporadic, enclosed developments.

But there lies a discord within such communities. The idea of community largely rests on the concept of commons, the philosophy of which is that of reciprocity, of social ethics. The principles of such ethics and contingency have developed from traditional ways of life and knowledge and most importantly the simple sense of belonging. Standing at odds with our modern rationality, it does not recognize a homogenous pattern of the globe where each spot on the globe consists merely of coordinates on a grid, or a uniform field where determinants of everyone’s and everything’s rights and roles are prefabricated; but a nexus of human relationships, the right of local people to define their own grid, and the nature-society symbiosis.

The common-ness of suburban communities and their ways of life often eludes such deep-seated philosophy. As compared to organic neighborhoods, it does not only portray the absence of any particular building(s), local shops, or public spaces; but more importantly the absence of the space in between: the social connections that can give life to forms. But barely does this invoke a sense privation or isolation. The insidious erosion of perception, often wrought by economic rationality and social operations “rediscovers” the (lacking) fractions in other sets of common spaces, such as shopping mall or theme parks. Such lifestyle with which a large percentage of the present generation has sought to live or desires to, seems to have confused the needs and necessities of survival with the needs of fulfillment, bolstering the process of “methodical universalism”, that has being categorically engaged in creating “communities” at the cost of “commons” .