The community question re-evaluated

Given its importance to human kind and accessibility to public discourse, it is a safe guess that the community question in some form will remain open to the end of time. Important transformations have taken place since World War II in scholarly approaches to the question. Systematic efforts to gather data have supplanted armchair theorizing. New ways of studying local social bistortes have demythologiZed notions of stable pastoral villages. Network analysis has freed the community question from its traditional preoccupation with solidarity and neighbourhood. The broad shift towards structural analysis in the social sciences has created possibilities for the integration of the community question with studies of the family, household, and personal health. The development of political economic thought has made salient questions about how relations of power and dependency in large-scale social systems engender and reflect interpersonal relationships of cooperation and power . • This is a slightly revised version of a paper appealing in the inaugural 1987 volume of Comparative Urban and Community Research, an annual review edited by Michael Peter Smith and published by Transaction Pertodicals Consortium (New Brunswick NJ 08903). THE COMMUNITY QUESTION RE-EVALUATED! Looking for Community "Things ain't wot they used to be" the music hall song laments. Contemporary urbanites perversely flatter themselves by remarking how stressful are modern times. They fear that . communities have fallen apart, with loneliness and alienation leading to a war of all against all. They are sure that their preindustrial ancestors led charmed lives when they could bathe 1n the warmth of true solidary community. A large part of the fear comes from a selective perception of the present. Many urbanites think they are witnessing loneliness when they observe people walking or driving by themselves. Mass media quickly and graphically circulate news about New York subway attacks and Parisian bombings. The public generalizes its fears the attack could take place next door tomorrowand ahistorically forgets to compare contemporary crime and political violence rates with the past. Paradoxically, few urbanites will confess to living lives of lonely desperation. They know that they have supportive communities, and that their friends. neighbours, kin and coworkers have them as well. Yet each person believes that he or she is the exception: it is the vast hordes out there in the "mass society" who are lonely and isolated. At the same time, nostalgia for the perfect pastoral past dims awareness of the powerful stresses and cleavages that have always pervaded human society. The inhabitants of almost all contemporary societies have less to worry about than their predecessors with respect to the basics of human life. People now are likely to eat better, be better housed and clothed, suffer less personal and property crime, live longer, and see their loved ones live longer. In their concern about current problems, people often forget about the ones that are no more. AIDS does not appear to rival the Black Death; automobile pollution is more benign than knee-deep horse manure.