Understanding 'community'

People live by norms. They adapt to certain ways of living purely by culture. We find that the world is too big a place for us to sustain or just attempt to sustain ourselves by ourselves. This has brought forth the nature of co-independence in humans that evidently provides the need for us to create communities. It might seem just as simple as that, but it more so appears that as we dwell deeper into defining this term ‘community’, we do not find a fixed explanation that can also go on to justify why we create these communities. In this paper I will attempt to express and conceptualise ‘community’, and furthermore make clear the contrast with the narrow understanding that I and I assume many people in our society have of this name. Most of which will come from my experiences in and of communities.

Going to District 6 in Cape Town and visiting their museum and the homecoming centre there showed me how diverse a community can be. What I appreciated the most is seeing how much being part of a community can mean to so many people. When listening to the stories and history of District 6, I couldn’t help but ponder that if these struggles of being removed from their homes and relocated under laws that served to oppress them had not arose back in those days, would those people be the united front that they are today, or would they have just lived on like ordinary neighbourhoods. Just like Shamila and her constituents who were threatened to be evicted from their homes (Shamila’s House Movie), they were already a united front and their struggles only made their bonds and ability to work together even more strong. At this point ‘community’ to me was clear to be strongly linked to people’s common interests and struggles.

The ex-residents of District 6 shared stories and emphasised that even though they were relocated from their homes in District 6 to different locations in Cape Town because of the Group Areas Act, they still remained a strong community. This is through vast banks of memories and the continued fights to relocate back to District 6. This eliminated geography as a key player in defining ‘community’ but acknowledged that it still greatly affects the community itself and how they live. We see this during the walk and exploring Cape Town how within just a walking distance you can move from a congested, polluted (especially sound) and black dominated part of the city and get to a clean, tranquil and white dominated one.

This introduced race in the attempt to understand what ‘community’ is. It seems, more especially in Cape Town that race plays a big role in how people are distributed into their respective communities. I do not believe race factors in defining ‘community’ but it is the reality we live in. Coupled with income range, race has affected where people are located in Cape Town, around the country and the world. “In South Africa, for example, the term ‘community’ has for some time been used as a gloss for talking about predominantly black poor groups” (Rohleder et al, 2008). Race should not define a community, but it should be considered when understanding communities and more especially their history. If this was not the case, we would not be finding the remains of slaves stored in shoe boxes at the back of coffee shops in the centre of one of the biggest cities on our country. Home is where we belong, and as individuals we affiliate ourselves with people that look like us. Sometimes establishing mono-racial communities. I suggest we incorporate race in understanding ‘community’ under identity. This country has a harsh history of racism and whether we like it or not, our identities will always group us into foreign communities.

Link et al (2011) found communities to be substantially complex and to have the ability to be seen in more ways than one. This follows his then flawed understanding that of communities to be what he described as “a unified locality and full of residents banded together by similar interests and a geographic identity” (Link et al, 2011). I for one saw communities in the same way before. My understanding is still aligned with Hunter Link’s but more broad and flexible like his findings. He raised an important issue of how to engage with communities when trying to solve their problems or during their development as a non-member professional. One might argue that, the fact that communities are multi-faceted is in the advantage of us as professionals. We need to see the community on different lights and more detail to help immensely in our decision-making processes.  I think this ability is how engineering was used as a weapon to segregate people into different spaces. It would be to the society’s gain to use this to fold back these disgusting faults.

 When becoming a professional engineer, I will expect my projects to cater to the community’s needs. Which is why community engagement is so important. “Built artefacts of design are not in themselves powerful enough to make the world a better place, Community participation and ownership of a design project and its active involvement in managing the facilities developed are critical” (Coetzer, 2011). This goes to show the power communities have. The idea of a community having a group of representatives to help in decision-making is too basic when communities have individuals as the building blocks. Especially when the definition and understanding of ‘community’ is so complex in itself. However, it needs emphasis that professionals should work with the community with regards to development and not for community.

I have come to understand the term community as a "space" where a collective of individuals interact with each other and share different ideas brought together by common goals, challenges and beliefs. It is a united body that in it still represents its individual members. This definition has broadened up to understanding that this might not necessarily be prompted by physical geography or racial groups and it goes further and deeper than that. This lack of understanding of what constitutes a community and how do you engage with it may be the root of the slow improvement and developments within the community. What I found most interesting is how members of the same space and community can have different perspectives of the same community that they are a part of particularly with regards to how they would describe and view it. From the beginning of the Social Infrastructures module I felt as if the discussions where just ideas and thoughts being thrown around without a conclusion or result to what defines the concepts we covered. It is only now when you reflect and try to articulate the concepts that you get the sense of where we were going with this. In short, we have given meaning to words that cannot be defined.

To some extent maybe ‘community’ should be subclassified. Cape Town Community (geographical), Gay Community (gender based), Black Community (racial), Facebook Community (online) etc. One person can be part of different communities at the same time and this clearly means that there has to be certain aspects of themselves that classifies them as part of those different communities. For example, a Muslim UCT student (in no particular order) living in res. They can be part of a Muslim community, the UCT community if there exists one and also be part of any community that may occur within their residence. Maybe we should intertwine community with society and just define it as small groups of people choosing to be a single entity and part of something bigger and then explore the why from there - what faces of themselves have brought them together. A student during an engagement in the Social Infrastructure class asked: “Can a person be part of a community that they don’t want be a part of?” [UCT SI Student; Female] and I think this trajectory of thinking answers her.

With all that, our generation is connected in one way or another. The internet has created spaces for new communities. Even with no physical geography and infrastructure, the basis of these communities is still common interests, race, gender, struggles etc. We should accept that community is not a term that can be defined but can be understood depending on why you are attempting to define it. Understand why you are engaging with that particular community and why you consider it as a community. A term as flexible at this one can hinder infrastructural development and how people use that infrastructure. That is what I understand of the term ‘community’.

References:

Coetzer, N. (2013). Op Ed Cape Times – Water and washing meeting place.

Link, H., McNally, T., Sayre, A., Schmidt, R., & Swap, R. (2011) The definition of community: a student perspective. Partnerships: A Journal of Service Learning and Civic Engagement, Vol. 2, No. 2 Fall 1-9.

Shamila’s House Movie