Place-based and IT Mediated ‘Community”

Neighbourhoods and whole cities are increasingly being designed with a broadband telecommunications infrastructure that provides access to the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICTs) (for example CityPlace, Toronto, Canada; Arabianranta, Helsinki, Finland; Kenniswijk, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; and Playa Vista, California, USA). This access has ignited a debate into the nature of community and the effects of cyberspace on social relationships. On the one side, technological dystopians argue that in an information society where work, leisure and social ties are all maintained from the `smart house’, people could completely reject the need for social relationships based on physical location. While on the other side, technological utopians argue that the Internet has created a whole new form of community, the `virtual community’, which frees the individual from the restraints of geography and social characteristics like gender, race and ethnicity. What this `either or’ debate, arguing community either to be lost or recreated, fails to recognize, is that community has long been freed from geography and that new ICTs may hold as much promise of reconnecting us to communities of place as they do in liberating us from them. For the most part, `community’ still refers to neighbourhood. Yet most of the social support, and much of the information and resources that people require to function in their day-to-day lives, comes from sources outside of the local setting (Wellman et al., 1988). Cities are extremely heterogeneous, residents are highly mobile, and people regularly come in to contact with diverse others in a variety of social settings. As suggested by Fischer (1975) in his `subcultural theory’, individuals in an urban environment are not limited to those who are close at hand, but seek out social ties based on shared interest and mutual identi® cation. While this does not exclude the possibility that people can form social ties based on shared place, it does suggest that similarity of interest is more important in forming relations than similarity of setting. When one de® nes communities as sets of informal ties of sociability, support and identity, they are rarely neighbourhood solidarities or even densely-knit groups of kin and friends. Communities consist of far ung kinship, workplace, interest group and neighbourhood ties that together form a social network that provides aid, support, social control and links to multiple milieus. Within these personal communities people use multiple methods of communication: direct in-person contact, telephone, postal mail, and more recently fax, email, chats and email discussion groups. Looking for community in one place at one time (be it in neighbourhoods or in cyberspace) is an inadequate means of revealing supportive community relations. Indeed, `community without propinquity’ is hardly a new concept, but it is one that is often neglected (Webber, 1963). The creation of a whole new type of community, the `virtual community’, has done much to highlight the potential for communities to form beyond the con® nes of geographic space (Rheingold, 1993). Technological utopians have found community in cyberspace. Largely anecdotal evidence emphasizes the ability of computer networks to connect people across time and space in strong supportive relationships, blindly extending beyond characteristics of ethnicity, religion or national origin. As Phil Patton