Community as Urban Practice

Talja Blokland

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509504855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Community is a central idea in urban studies but remains conceptually vague and empirically difficult to work with. Building on existing theories of community, Talja Blokland offers an important contribution to defining and understanding this key theme. Blokland argues that there has been too much focus on community as a stable construct, formed by durable relationships with kin, friends, social groups or neighbours. She draws attention to the non-durable, fluid encounters that constitute community, theorizing communities as shared urban practices in a globalizing world. The book proposes two core ways of thinking about community: the dimension of familiarity, defined by our ability to construct identities, and the dimension of access, defined by our freedom to enter and leave urban spaces. These dimensions form various urban configurations which enable us to experience and practise community in diverse ways. As this book maintains, community is after all an urban practice, not a fixed state of affairs.

1
Introduction

Some people may have roots and others may have routes, but all do community. In Köpenick, a district in the south-east of Berlin, a few 30–50-year-olds, mostly men, meet at the Old Forestry, the stadium of their football team 1. FC Union; their casual public behaviour and visible familiarity with one another suggest long-term understandings of the place and its shared history. They do community as a ‘public doing’, inside and outside the stadium: they greet old acquaintances, chat, inquire about friends of friends and old schoolmates, and drink beer. While they make their way into the stadium with their annual passes, they move alongside groups of distinctively stylish ‘new’ Berliners, male and female. These ‘new’ Berliners come to the match too, now that the second league's team seems to be something of a cult. The first kind of people are clearly rooted; their narratives of place and their performance of local identity construct a community. They contrast with the ‘new’ Berliners, who have adopted the city as their own for the time being, as they are en route. These fans compare notes on the ‘feel’ of the stadium in East Berlin, evoking other leagues, in other cities and in other countries, which also draw strong local crowds. These ones have routes; their narratives of place and their performances of temporarily local identities construct a community too, but one of a very different type – at least in the eyes of a sociologist.

Community as a concept, Hamilton writes (1985: 8), ‘provides both a means of encompassing a wide variety of social processes and an idea which has much more than a technical meaning, for it refers to symbols, values and ideologies which have popular currency’. Community manifests itself in the details of everyday life. Society transforms, but people ‘continue to place a high value on what they call communities’ (Charles and Davies 2005: 672). By giving value to communities, they hold imaginations of what they are. As Anderson argued in his influential book Imagined Communities, ‘all communities […] are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’ (Anderson 1991: 6). But how do such imaginations occur as social figurations? We may ask people where they feel they belong or what they perceive as their community; but, after having done that, we still have gained little understanding of the processes and mechanisms that bring about such communities and our experiences of them. We know that ‘place’ assumes a certain meaning (or not) in such perceptions, but we don't know how. How does community, as it is imagined, come about in, or as a form of, social practice?

Recent scholarship on belonging has aimed to theorize the meaning of place for people's sense of belonging anew in times of increased mobility. Yet talking about where one belongs is one thing; experien­cing belonging through practice is quite another. For this reason Benson and Jackson (2013: 794) have emphasized the need to incorporate performativity into discussions on belonging: ‘People do not merely select a place to live that matches their habitus; rather, places are made through repeated everyday interactions and interventions that work both on the neighbourhood and the individual.’ A sense of belonging is not simply a feeling, but the outcome of practices, especially of performances, or social practices ‘in front of others’ (Helbrecht and Dirksmeier 2013: 286). Urban spaces provide important stages for such performances (ibid., 283). This small book explores the idea of community as urban practice.

As more and more people do not live where they were born and routes, for example diasporas, can become a source of connection and togetherness, the construction of what ‘community’ means is increasingly diverse, dynamic and contested. Yet the long-time residents of Berlin Köpenick sense that ‘community’ has changed. What can be observed at the Old Forestry resonates with what happens in other places.

Italian Americans in New Haven, Connecticut, experienced that their ‘community’ had changed. Initially a community of Italian immigrants working in New Haven factories, the neighbourhood underwent decay when Italian Americans moved to the suburbs. Displacement when a highway was built across the area meant the end of local attachments through daily practices. The migration of African Americans from the South of the United States to northern cities transformed its demographics further. Today Italian Americans come back to celebrate their lost community and heritage at parish feasts and local festivals, distancing themselves from white middle-class residents who have since moved in and gentrified the neighbourhood (Blokland 2009a). ‘Native’ Dutch older women in Hillesluis – a Rotterdam neighbourhood where most men used to work for a shipbuilding factory closed long ago – now share with people from over 50 nationalities a shopping street in which all butchers have turned ‘halal’. When they complain that they cannot buy pork chops anymore, these women, too, express the feeling that their ‘community’ has changed (see Blokland 2001). Some may even hint that a crisis is afoot. A lot was not right under the East German regime, but collective memories include the notion that community was more cohesive and more supportive and that, notwithstanding all the control from the Stasi and the effect this had on trust, people held together; and this kind of community is now lost. The Italian Americans opted for single-family homes with lawns and white picketed fences when they could afford it; but they believe that the solidarity of the old neighbourhood has never been replaced. Poverty reigned and religion and politics caused clashes in Rotterdam's Hillesluis in the years before the Second World War, but ‘we used to be more one’ is a well-known comment.

Is this all just nostalgic lamenting about a lost community? Nostalgia and community go hand in hand, as nostalgia gives meaning to current experiences of self and identity. According to Field and Swanson (2007: 11),

popular cultural myths […] most significantly […] provide people with the vocabulary and beliefs to understand and cope with a myriad of challenges within the city. Our sense of self and identities are in the process of becoming through continuity and discontinuity, sameness and difference, belonging and displacement, private and public presence.

(Field and Swanson 2007: 11; see also Lasch 1991: 120)

Popular imagination, which includes nostalgic representations of the past, shapes identities and gives agency. As Leydesdorff (1994) has argued in her study of the memories of a community of Jews in Amsterdam before the Second World War, constructions of the past serve more of a role in the here and now than they do by reflecting how things used to be. Similarly, Fentress and Wickham (1992: 126) note that ‘the way memories of the past are generated and understood by given social groups is a direct guide to how they understand their position in the present’. The very existence of such shared narratives shows that community is still a ‘public doing’ – as Jenkins (1996) put it, notably in a small book on identity – if only ‘constituted symbolically’, as the reconstruction of a community that no longer exists (Charles and Crow 2012: 400; see also Morgan 2005: 563–4). Through nostalgia, fragmented communities can be performed as cohesive and unified: nostalgia ‘becomes a means of making connections’ (Savage et al. 2010: 117) and shapes narratives of place-based belonging (ibid., 156). So I would say: no, the narratives of East Berliners, Italian Americans or Rotterdammers are not just nostalgic lamenting about a lost community.

In the examples above, narratives of the past serve as public performances that show us that community may have changed but is all but lost: what is lost – or, better, has been transformed – is the one-to-one fit of ‘a community’ with ‘a place’. Communities overlap in large cities, may not even be geographically fixed, can consist of occupational groups or religion or a location on the internet rather than be geographical (Charles and Crow 2012: 400). As Konings, van Dijk and Foeken (2006: 4) show in the case of African cities, links with the wider world, even across a nation's border, have gained importance. Hence imaginations of communities may have referents to localities, but people increasingly do not stick to the places where they were born and raised and form connections across large distances. However, in laypersons' use of the term ‘community’, this transformation of the connection between community and place comes across as if community itself was lost.

Yet the need for community seems everywhere. Urban planners need to work with ‘the community’; policy interventions need support from ‘the community’; activists organize protests on behalf of ‘the community’. Housing movements and civil rights movements organize protests through ‘community’ in cities like Mumbai or São Paulo. Identity politics, including concerns to ‘be heard and recognized rather than subsumed in a homogeneous liberal democratic citizenry’ (Macdonald, Edwards and Savage 2005: 596), resurrect an interest in community. Often problems with ‘community’ are ‘held responsible for aspects of social life which worry people greatly, including loneliness, crime, fear and disorder’ (Day 2006: x). Political uses of ‘community’ can hom­ogenize categories into community. When a man with a Turkish migration background stabbed a teacher in a school in a Dutch city a few years ago, politicians requested a statement from the leaders of ‘the Turkish community’. Similarly, as described by Werbner (2005: 747), the riots by young South Asian Muslims in Oldham and Bradford, deindustrialized towns in the north of England, led to calls on the ‘Asian community’ to ‘integrate’. Werbner continues:

It is significant that the Bradford or Oldham communities that were said to lack leadership and cohesiveness were not conceived of as exclusively Asian or white – they included both, obliterating difference. What was thus racialized, pathologized and indeed criminalized, was the internal social cohesiveness and cultural distinctiveness of the ethnic community, and secondarily, of the white working class communities […] adjacent to it.

(Werbner 2005: 748)

In initiatives for, actions in the name of, or appeals to communities, time and again, the term ‘community’ comes up. Whether positive or negative, it is used to point to an entity that is cohesive, hangs or sticks together, and has clear boundaries. Most often, those boundaries are thought to be social in the sense that the end of community is where networks end, and geographical, or limited to a certain area. Community is thus a widely used term. It has the convenience of being imprecise and loaded with positive connotations, a social ‘something’ that we cannot be against (Williams 1976: 65–6; Etzioni 1995; Tam 1998 – all quoted in Day 2006: 14).

This imprecision, the moral connotation and the political currency of the term may also be the reasons why today's urban scholars, like other social scientists, are reluctant to use it. Whereas they have few reservations about other fundamentally contested concepts, especially concepts that are clearly on the left of the political spectrum, ‘community’ seems to put them off. It is out of fashion, even old-fashioned, maybe inherently conservative. The new terminology in urban studies is instead one of belonging, home, attachment to place and identity. I speculate that this change of terms sometimes has clear conceptual reasons, but at other times reflects a fear to touch words or themes that matter to the residents of Berlin's Köpenick, of the General's Square in New Haven or of Hillesluis in Rotterdam but are not easy to position within the dominant critical urban studies. The problem with community is that it is always political – always intensely connected to power – but not by definition politically at home in either critical urban studies or urban studies of a more conformist – if not conservative – character. Only because, in social sciences, the original approach to the idea of community has associated it with ‘organic’ and natural features does this entity seem to ‘inevitably […] belong more with the social order of the past’ and is it equated with ‘situations of stability and persistence’, so that the discussion has a bias in a conservative direction (Day 2006: 6) and ‘change [has] become constructed as its enemy’ (ibid., 8).

Too often, ‘community’ has been used to cover less benign political practices, to define outsiders and scapegoats, to make moral appeals for support for or participation in actions that harmed other groups and individuals; and it has functioned as a vehicle for power and its exercise in processes of nation formation (Anderson 1991). Pol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Epigraph
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Traditions of Theorizing Community
• 3: Community as Culture
• 4: Engagements, Encounters, Social Ties
• 5: Relational Settings of Belonging
• 6: Practices of Exclusion
• 7: Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement