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Building Community in a Neighborhood
from Building Community
Ed Schwartz, President
Institute for the Study of Civic Values
Philadelphia, 1991
A. Neighborhood Pride
The common elements of most definitions of neighborhood are
territory and inhabitants. Ruth Glass describes a
neighborhood as "a distinct territorial group, distinct by
virtue of the specific physical characteristics of the area
and the specific social characteristics of the inhabitants."
It is easy, she observes, to find neighborhoods that are
distinct territorial groups, but it is difficult, especially
in cities, to find neighborhoods whose inhabitants are also
in close social contact with one another. In rural areas,
neighborhoods in both sense were easier to locate. Their
characteristics have been summarized as follows: places with
a name known to their inhabitants and smaller in size
than a community, having common facilities such as a general
store, a grist mill, or a school, and marked by social
relations that include the exchange of assistance and
friendly visiting. These are still the chief dimensions
considered in urban studies. Ideally, residents
of different neighborhoods are marked by a particular pattern
of life-the subculture of their district--Whose norms will
reflect the type of terrain occupied, the dominant type of
land usage, the social traditions, and the general
socioeconomic structure of the area. All of
these elements operate within flexible but real geographic
bounds.
Suzanne Keller, The Urban Neighborhood: A Sociological
Perspective
The first step in planning for a neighborhood or in preparing to
organize it is to determine what it is. If a city government
decides that a particular section of town is a neighborhood, it is
usually on the basis of discussions, even interviews, with people
who live in it. The most serious organizational problems arise
when citizens themselves do not feel that they are part of a
specific neighborhood, or when they disagree as to what it looks
like. Therefore, before reading on, ask two simple questions: what
is my neighborhood and what are its boundaries? If others in the
class agree with your assessment, then you all are at least
starting in the same place. If you do not agree, then a critical
item for class discussion will be the boundaries of the
neighborhood itself.
You also ought to have a general picture of the neighborhood. What
is its population? How many residents are in their 20's, how many
between 20 and 30, how many between 30 and 50, and how many over
50? Of these, how many are married and how many are unmarried? How
many families have children, and what is the average number of
children per family? What is the approximate number of children in
the entire neighborhood? The 1990 Census will provide some
of this information, and under certain conditions your City
government can actually obtain it by neighborhood. You ought to
check with your city planning commission or housing agency on
this, because an assessment of who is in the neighborhood is
obviously critical to determining the basis upon which they might
come together.You ought to know what is in the neighborhood. Some
buildings will be obvious--a school, a factory, the most commonly
used stores. Yet you would be surprised at how many institutions
and commercial establishments are located in your neighborhood of
which you are completely unaware. If you have a few central
commercial strips, you might walk through them, and make a note of
every single store, company, and agency operating on them. These
will have a decisive impact on the social, economic, and civic
environment of the neighborhood, even if their influence will not
necessarily be evident at first.
The next item for consideration should revolve around what you
actually do in your neighborhood. You live there--meaning that you
own or rent your home and experience all the problems
associated with housing. You also travel to and from your home,
suggesting that the quality of transportation is important to your
neighborhood. If you have children, they will spend a substantial
amount of time in the neighborhood--playing, going to and from
school, moving around. Child-rearing is an important neighborhood
activity, so that many people will judge quality of life in the
neighborhood in terms of what it offers children.
There are other important human needs which you might or might not
meet in your neighborhood. Fifty years ago, you might well have
worked near your own home, and a few people still do. Fifteen
years ago, you probably still would have shopped for most of your
necessities within a radius of a few blocks, and even in this age
of shopping centers there are many places where this is possible.
Social activities continue to occur within neighborhoods; and, if
your neighbors are your friends, the chances are that you take
part in them. The more activities in which you participate in the
neighborhood, the more it will affect the things you do and, by
extension, the greater your interest will be in its overall
environment.
Having analyzed who is living in and what is happening in the
neighborhood, you ought to assess how you feel about it. What
about the neighborhood are you proud of? Is it basically a nice
place, with only a few problems which the residents want to solve?
Or is the neighborhood experiencing rapid
deterioration--increasing abandonment of housing and stores;
rising unemployment; growing problems with local kids? Or,
perhaps, the neighborhood has faced these problems for years and
would be considered a slum or ghetto by outsiders. In what do the
people who live in the neighborhood take pride? What do others
think of it? Do you know?
The question of feelings relates to your own and other peoples'
willingness to work for community change. Would you see yourself
staying in the neighborhood for only a few years, until you move
to more suitable surroundings, or is the neighborhood where you
would prefer to live for at least a decade, if not the rest of
your life? What about the others in the neighborhood--are they
planning to stay, or is the turnover widespread and continuous? Do
children who grow up in the neighborhood generally stay in it, or
do they leave? If they leave--which is the most common
pattern today--do young people arrive to take their places? These
questions are among the most important that you must ask before
even beginning to think about organizing a neighborhood.
Obviously, if the residents are fed up with local conditions--if
they would jump at the chance to get out--they will hardly respond
to appeals to join in efforts to improve them.
Thus, as a starting point, you have to know what your neighborhood
is, who lives in it, what is happening in it, and how you and your
neighbors feel about it. The answers to these basic questions
will shape what the kind of community that you can build.
B. What is Community?
A community is a group of people united by the common objects
of their love.
--St. Augustine, City of God
Some consensus exists concerning at least three elements in
the definition of community. One, community is a social unit
of which space is an integral part; community is a place, a
relatively small one. Two, community indicates a
cOnfiguration as to way of life, both as to how people do
things and what they want--their institutions and collective
goals. A third notion is that of collective action. Persons
in a community should not only be able to, but frequently do
act together in the common concerns of life.
--Howard Kaufman, "Towards an Interactional Conception of
Community"
Having identified what your neighborhood is, who lives in it, and
what pride you and they take in it, you can begin your assessment
of the neighborhood as a community. The word "community"
is used in so many ways these days that it is difficult to
understand what people mean by it. Residents for example, will
refer to, "community" implying that they share something more than
the land on which their homes are located. At the same time, we
hear references to the "Black community" or the "Italian
community," assuming an identity of purpose within a racial or
ethnic minority that extends throughout the country. Thus,
activists in urban neighborhoods often talk about creating a
"sense of community" among the poor who live there, without ever
considering whether it is possible to create this mysterious
feeling in their particular locale.
We, therefore, will establish our own definition of community, the
one upon which this text is based, from the beginning. It is a
tough definition. We believe that a community is a group of
people working together actively to achieve a common goal. Or, in
St. Augustine's classic formulation that begins this section, "a
community is a group of people united around the common
object of their love." The notion of unity is critical to this
definition. The idea that people work together is central to it.
The idea that they accept the authority of the group over their
behavior--that is, once the group decides, they go along--is
critical. Without these conditions, we believe that there is no
community, even if the people involved might share a common space,
a common race, or even a common ethnic nationality and
citizenship. Building community is a process of sharing in the
pride that we take in our origins and our values.
This tough definition of community allows us to identify degrees
of community among people. A group of people may share the common
goal of building a house. They are willing to work together to
build the house. They are willing to accept the authority of the
group over their house-building decisions. Yet that is the extent
of the community that binds them. The would not accept the
authority of the group over their vacation plans, or agree to work
together to sponsor a picnic. Moreover, once the house is built,
their community ceases. This is a community as far as it goes, but
its members and those who observe it must understand how far it
does go. Often, neighborhood activists show great enthusiasm when
they mobilize people around a specific issue or cause, only to
become disgusted when the group disbands after the issue is won or
lost. They have failed to identify the limits of the objective
which the group shared.
This tough definition of community also allows us to identify
different kinds of communities. Community may be a value, but it
is not an ultimate value. As St. Augustine himself argued, the
"common objects" of people's love may vary considerably. There are
communities devoted to farming, to war, and communities organized
to pursue a spiritual ideal. The partners in a law firm
may constitute a community of the law practice, just as the active
members of a union share a community devoted to decent wages,
hours, and working conditions for their members. Nazis had
a community with one another--based upon their common love of war,
conquest, and genocide.
The early Puritans in the United States, by dramatic contrast,
shared a quite different kind of community, devoted to the pursuit
of God's will as revealed in Scripture and interpreted by their
Ministers. Thus, our assessment of the moral character of a
community will depend upon our assessment of its common
objectives. As Puritan preachers themselves put it, "The mind is
great if the object of its desire is great: "as the things and
objects are great or mean, that men converse withall; so they are
high or low spirited."
Our objective, then, is to establish the goals for which the
residents of a neighborhood will work as a community, the shared
objects of neighborhood pride. There may be groups of people in an
area collectively pursuing worthy projects of their own, some of
which may even enhance the local quality of life. Certainly, a
citizen organization should take advantage of these programs as
they design their own plans for the neighborhood. Yet the
community that we are aiming to establish here is the one that
says, "We are working together to improve the neighborhood--that
is the goal which unites us. We will support other community
projects only if they also contribute to this central neighborhood
objective."
>From this perspective, it should be even clearer why a careful
assessment of what people expect from a neighborhood--and what
they are prepared to do for it--is a critical step to take before
attempting to establish a local grass-roots organization of any
kind. If citizens view their neighborhood merely as a place to
live, but not as a focal point for the activities that are
important to them: work, socializing, civic participation--they
will ignore all appeals to join a group whose objective is
neighborhood improvement. They'll throw fliers placed under their
doors in the waste basket. They'll pass posters for community
events without seeing them. They won't even have heard of the
group, despite all of its efforts to get their attention. The
fault here will not be with the organization. It will rest,
rather, with people's attitudes toward the neighborhood. If a
resident feels no obligation to identify with the neighborhood as
a common home with others, he or she will share few goals with
those who want to build a community to improve their collective
lives.
Therefore, an assessment of how people feel about the neighborhood
individually should lead to an analysis of the objectives in which
they might take pride as a group. Two quite different situations
are possible: one in which a strong community already exists in
the neighborhood, which merely needs to be directed to specific
goals for improvement; as contrasted with the neighborhood where
residents are not tied together in any way initially but emerges
as a community through collective action to solve neighborhood
problems. A word about each is in order.
C. From Community to Neighborhood
It is not necessary that the idea of justice precede the
sense of fraternity among citizens...In fact, it is more
likely that the sense of likeness and kindred raises
questions about the origin, the paternity of this kinship.
Men in political society retain their ties to a community of
birth. This is not simply the result of necessity: it
reflects men's imperfect knowledge of justice and of the good
life. All human beings and doctrines are uncertain,
yet some rules continue to be needed: and custom and
bloodright, though based on false premises, pass the
pragmatic test as working principles for a continuous
society.
--Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America
A neighborhood is more than their house; it's more than the
money that they can invest or the money that they could get
-- it's a sense of pride, a sense of family, it's a sense of
sensitivity; it's a sense of church; it's a sense of school.
It's a sense. It's a sixth or seventh sense that no newcomer
can ever have ... This is a neighborhood, South Philadelphia
is a neighborhood.
--Joanne Weller, from Paul R. Levy, The Eclipse of Community
The first sort of neighborhood that presents itself is the one in
which a sense of community exists already. The values of these
neighborhoods are quite similar in nature. They may be summarized
as follows:
1) A shared religious faith, fostered by a church or
synagogue that constitutes the real civic center of the
community. In 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that, "In
the United States, religion exercises but little
influence upon the laws and upon the details of
public opinion; but directs the customs of the community,
and, by regulating domestic life, it regulates the state"
Secular values may dominate the major institutions today, but
the church remains a powerful force in our neighborhoods.
Caroline Golab observes in Immigrant Destinies that the Port
Richmond section of Philadelphia, "supported five
Roman Catholic churches and parishes, four of which were
organized along 'nationality' lines -- Polish, Lithuanian,
German and Italian -- and one that was the territorial or
'Irish' church. There was also a Jewish synagogue and at
least a half-dozen churches, representing Episcopalians,
Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists, both black and white
.. These religious institutions were often very close to one
another -- across the street, next door or down the block.
This pattern, observable in any neighborhood in Philadelphia
during the period (the early part of the 2Oth Century),
persisted until at least the Second World War." In some
neighborhoods, the pattern persists to this day.
2) Shared national or ethnic history -- As Golab suggests, a
resident may not be merely a Catholic, but an Italian, Irish,
or Eastern European Catholic; not merely a Jew, but a German
or a Russian Jew. Moreover, there are important differences
in the ways in which these national groupings have "clustered
in America," as Golab points out:
In clustering tightly together in America's cities, the
immigrants of southern and eastern Europe were doing what
comes naturally. It could even be argued that had
America in 1900 been a blank slate, devoid of all physical as
well as social economic structures, southern and eastern
Europeans would still have chosen to cluster tightly
because of the social imperatives of their cultural systems.
The peoples of southern and eastern Europe had a very
different sense of society and person identity from
those of northern and western Europe -- and hence the bulk of
Americans, southern and eastern Europeans were 'network'
peoples. Their identity, security, self-control,
and stimulation derived not just from their membership in a
group that they could see, hear, touch, and smell at all
times."
3) Pride in the neighborhood -- This is what Alexis de
Tocqueville described as the "Spirit of Township" in New
England in the 1830's:
The New Englander is attached to his township not so much
because he was born in it, but because it is a free and
strong community, of which he is a member, and
which deserves the care spent in managing it.... Another
important fact is that the township is so constituted as to
excite the warmest of human affections without
arousing the ambitious passions of the heart of man ... The
township, at the center of the ordinary relations of life,
serves as a field for the desire of public esteem, the
want of exciting interest, and the taste for authority and
popularity; and the passions that commonly embroil society,
change their character when they find a vent so near
the domestic hearth and the family circle.
To this day, many city dwellers invest "the old neighborhood" with
this kind of pride. "This was a beautiful area in so many ways,"
observes Joanne Weller in Paul Levy's study of Queen Village
-- a "redeveloped" neighborhood in Philadelphia -- "especially in
the Queen Village area. It is an amazing area. It is in my opinion
at least, the most ethnically and racially mixed community in
all of Philadelphia, and this is basically because of the way
people landed along the docks. There was a point in time in the
fifties where every ethnic and racial group could be found in
Queen Village: Russian Orthodox, Russian Jews, German Jews, and
groups that I don't even know where they came from. There were
Armenians. Everything was there."
Other Queen Village residents are no less enthusiastic:
MARGE SCHERNECKE:
"I don't recall that when I was in high school we would walk
around the neighborhood and think of it as a slum. I never
thought of the neighborhood as a slum because when we were
kids, I think it was more -- I don't know -- there were more
people who were related to each other who lived here and
their families at the time. And everybody was sort of in the
same economic level at that point and were probably poor but
we didn't think of it that way."
ALFREDA PLOCHA:
"Well, at that time no one said not to go here, not to go
there. No one had any fear of anything. For that matter, the
nights were very hot and nobody had their door closed. I
mean, you could have walked into any house and the door was
open and nobody had their door locked or closed and in the
summertime, the people used to bring their mattresses on
the yard, and sleep in the yard because it was very, very hot
but there was no fear at all then."
Thus, religion, ethnic history, and the "spirit of township" all
have contributed to building strong communities within
neighborhoods, to which citizens have developed passionate
loyalties. John Schaar, Professor of Political Science at the
University of California at Santa Cruz, has argued
that in Plato's writings of political community, "political
community is possible only under a couple of prior conditions --
where, first of all, men are bound together by a common reverence
for the same conception of justice and of virtue. Secondly, these
tablets of justice and of virtue must be based on divine origin,
must be hallowed by tradition and must be enforced by the laws
and the institutions." While the United States as a whole cannot
meet these conditions -- and while they are even difficult to
realize within a city -- they most certainly come close to
fulfillment in neighborhoods that have been settled by distinctive
religious and national groups. Here, the problem is not creating a
community, but preserving it against all the forces in modern
society that work to tear it apart.
D. From Neighborhood to Community
Among democratic nations...all the citizens are independent
and feeble; they can hardly do anything by themselves, and
none of them can oblige his fellow man to lend him their
assistance. They all, therefore, become powerless if they do
not voluntarily learn to help one another.
--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
If some neighborhoods remain as homogeneous as the ethnic
communities of previous generations, most do not. Furthermore,
even these old neighborhoods are not now quite as uniform as many
of us remember them. Caroline Golab notes that religious and
social differences always have made the process of building
community in neighborhoods a difficult one:
When Poles, Italians, and Jews moved in, each carrying with
them their implicit sense of community, they merely added to
the number of structures and networks already
present. They did not enter into or identify with any of the
structures or networks already established. Poles, Italians,
Jews, Irish, Germans, Anglo-Americans, and
blacks shared the same space and identified with the same
neighborhood, but they did not, as a result, feel impelled to
interact socially or emotionally. Indeed, the separate
cultural or ethnic networks, each with intangible boundaries
eventually embodied in formal institutions, were what enabled
diverse peoples to live together as successfully
as they did -- for conflict was always possible.
Neighborhood conflict invariably occurred between old
established groups and newer ones moving in on top of them --
the sort of successive arrival best illustrated by the
lack of conflict among Italians, Jews and Poles who happened
to enter a neighborhood approximately at the same time.
Thus, instead of one community operating in the neighborhood,
there frequently are several, along with all the individuals who
remain unattached to any formal institution or group.
It is the effort to create organizations in these neighborhoods
that have proven to be difficult. How does an activist create
alliances among groups that merely coexist, often in a state of
uneasy tension with one another? How does the organizer reach out
to isolated individuals in the neighborhood to involve them in
decisions that affect the community as a whole? These are the
questions that get to the heart of the debate over how to build
community when none, in fact, exists.
A familiar response is to say simply "Why bother? In a free
society such as this, trying to build a sense of community between
people based simply on where we live is foolish. We can develop
the relationships that make the most sense to us around our
interests, regardless of our place of residence. Why, then, seek
to create loyalties within an arbitrary set of geographic
boundaries?" This position is, doubtless, the dominant view, upon
which most public policy is based.
There are important advantages to strong residential communities,
however, which we can identify. Maintaining relationships between
people is impossible unless we live close enough to
one another to see each other from time to time. "Reach out --
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