The Nature of Community

The Nature of Community

Robert L. Warren*

The idea of the American community is deceptively simple, as long as one does not require a rigid definition. The term evokes a rich imagery associated with the "country village," the "small town," or the "big city" of an earlier day. One thinks of the country village's Main Street, with its several stores and post office, and the streets, houses, and lawns that immediately surround it in the setting of an enveloping prairie, dairy-farm country, or forest. One recalls the road that traverses the five, ten, or twenty miles--seldom more except in the Far West--connecting it with a small city. Here in the small city is a larger population, a greater variety of shops and services, a daily newspaper, a series of wholesale establishments serving surrounding villages, perhaps a college or university, a hospital, a number of industries. Or one imagines the larger city with its concentration of people, its burgeoning suburbs, its businesses, medical center, museums, department stores, and newspapers that serve a large section of the state or perhaps parts of several states.

One thinks of places large and small, places whose appearances reflect the specialized industrial or other functions they perform, places that vary with climate and topography, with the origin of the people who first settled or later migrated there, with diverse history and traditions--places that differ from each other in a dozen ways and yet with much in common.

The idea of the American community is deceptively simple, as long as one does not require a rigid definition. The term evokes a rich imagery associated with the "country village," the "small town," or the "big city" of an earlier day. One thinks of the country village's Main Street, with its several stores and post office, and the streets, houses, and lawns that immediately surround it in the setting of an enveloping prairie, dairy-farm country, or forest. One recalls the road that traverses the five, ten, or twenty miles--seldom more except in the Far West--connecting it with a small city. Here in the small city is a larger population, a greater variety of shops and services, a daily newspaper, a series of wholesale establishments serving surrounding villages, perhaps a college or university, a hospital, a number of industries. Or one imagines the larger city with its concentration of people, its burgeoning suburbs, its businesses, medical center, museums, department stores, and newspapers that serve a large section of the state or perhaps parts of several states.

One thinks of places large and small, places whose appearances reflect the specialized industrial or other functions they perform, places that vary with climate and topography, with the origin of the people who first settled or later migrated there, with diverse history and traditions--places that differ from each other in a dozen ways and yet with much in common.

One thinks of communities, large or small, as clusters of people living in proximity in an area containing stores and other service facilities for the sustenance of local people and industries whose produce is distributed throughout a much wider area. Surrounding this concentration of people there is usually a much larger geographic area, which is the effective "service area" of that place and whose size varies according to types of "services."

Various criteria thought to characterize communities include a specific population living within a specific geographic area with shared institutions and values and significant social interaction....

Basic Transformations in Communities

Recent decades have seen an arresting transformation in American community life. The growth of large metropolitan complexes, including the mushrooming of suburbs and the transformation of the central cities, has received wide attention. But even in smaller communities outside the metropolitan complexes, changes are taking place that make older conceptions of community living inadequate. Thus, we find two interrelated developments. One is the actual change occurring in communities; the other is the change taking place in theoretical formulations among students of the community.

Perhaps the most conspicuous development is the constant filling in of large sections of the American landscape with concentrations of people in metropolitan areas. Metropolitan areas consist of large cities and the relatively densely populated territory surrounding them. Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas, as they are defined for the 1970 Census, must contain at least one city or twin cities of fifty thousand or more inhabitants. Generally they include the city's surrounding county and adjacent counties that have a metropolitan character and are integrated socially and economically with the county containing the central city. The most arresting development, perhaps, has been the closing of gaps between metropolitan areas, particularly on the eastern seaboard where the whole countryside from Portland, Maine, to Virginia is expected soon to constitute one solid metropolitan complex of overlapping and intermingling metropolitan areas. Similar complexes are developing in the Middle and Far West. What happens to traditional concepts of the community under these circumstances?

Even without the overlapping and intermingling, the very growth of the single metropolitan city has placed great strain on older conceptions of the community. While it may have been true that Brooklyn was always transformed into a small town when the old Brooklyn Dodgers were in a pennant race, it is difficult to conceive of Brooklyn as a community, let alone the whole of New York City, with its five boroughs, each a separate county, each large enough to he a good-sized city or metropolis in its own right, each constituting what was formerly a number of relatively independent though interrelated, communities. A half-century ago Canarsie, Flatbush, Bensonhurst, and Brownsville shared many of the characteristics that are usually associated with a community. Today the concept of community no longer fits them, nor does it fit the Borough of Brooklyn, which contains them, nor does it fit New York City. The concept's extension to the entire Metropolitan New York-northern New Jersey-southern Connecticut area has a certain logic but takes us so far away from earlier formulations of the community' as to demand a reexamination of the term.

At the same time the notion of the community as a limited geographic area with relatively definite ascertainable boundaries has become less tenable with the growth of overlapping municipal and other governmental or quasi- governmental units. A host of water