Keep Your Bureaucrats Out of My Sense of Community

One of the things that make the Antiplanner see red is whenever anyone talks about the need for government to help create a “sense of community.” John Gardner, of Common Cause, thinks of government “as a critical partner in” restoring a sense of community, and particularly would like to see more federal involvement.

As noted here last week, David Brooks thinks the infrastructure stimulus bill can build a sense of community by helping to “create suburban town squares.” Architect/planners like Andres Duany think their designs create a sense of community for the people who live in them.

Sense of community is hard to measure, which makes it ideal for urban planners who love to muck things up without being responsible for the results. Precisely because it is so difficult to measure, government should stay out of any efforts to create it.

The first important point to understand about community is that it is not now and probably never has been geographically based. Back in the 1950s, Herbert Gans spent a year living in Boston’s West End, a dense, mixed-use neighborhood that Jane Jacobs would predict had a high sense of community, and another year living in Levittown, New Jersey, a suburban neighborhood that Jacobs might predict would have a low sense of community. In fact, Gans found the same sense of community in both places, but specifically noted that people in Boston’s West End identified with their ethnic or religious groups more than with their physical neighborhood.

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Instead of being geographically or architecturally based, we form a sense of community with those who share some of our likes and dislikes. Having moved into a new neighborhood about a year ago, the Antiplanner has discovered a strong sense of community here, but it is among people who own dogs. Most of the people who do not own dogs do not participate in the community activities shared by those who do own dogs — presumably, the non-dog-owners have their own little communities.

The sense of community that comes from shared interests extends well beyond any political boundaries such as city, state, or even nation. The lump in my throat that I feel when I watch the Where the Hell is Matt? video must be due to some sense of community, but this sense has absolutely no geographic boundaries.

While it is fine to enjoy your sense of community if you have one, it isn’t clear to me that it is an essential part of daily life. It is clear that, in order to be able to function in society, people need to empathize with others — those who cannot end up being cruel and inhumane. But it is not clear that a sense of community is a necessary part of that empathy.

In fact, emphasizing community carries with it a real danger that people will end up placing community over individuals. This attitude has led to some of the worst evils in history. This makes me all the more interested in keeping government out of any sense of community we may have.

Thanks to the automobile, airplane, telephone, and Internet, we can share our sense of community with people all over the world. If we can’t take the initiative ourselves, people like Matt Harding can do it for us. We don’t need government to give us a sense of community, and we are better off if it doesn’t try.