How can we create the kind of communities we want to live in?

There was a packed event at the RSA last night, with strong representation by RSA Fellows, asking if people need community anymore, with inspiring speeches by Professor Amitai Etzioni and the Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP. You can listen to the event here, and also check out Professor Etzioni's blog.

There was a packed event at the RSA last night, with strong representation by RSA Fellows, asking if people need community anymore, with inspiring speeches by Professor Amitai Etzioni and the Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP. You can listen to the event here, and also check out Professor Etzioni's blog.

Professor Etzioni placed great emphasis on social norms as the foundation for strong local and national communities. Strong communities are not defined in terms of how much money people make (provided they have enough money to meet their basic needs – so not advocating the enjoyment of poverty). Rather they are about positive relationships with family and friends, spending more time in the local community, getting involved in volunteering. Relationships can be formed online as well as offline, so the internet can enable social connections.

Community is not necessarily a good thing. A community is people getting together, creating a shared identity, seeing a common future, but what people bond around could be dislike of minorities. By their very definition, communities have boundaries, so they exclude as well as include. Perhaps an area that Etzioni did not touch on was about power in communities. Even if the community has a positive shared purpose, that does not mean that all members will benefit/influence equally.

Professor Etzioni’s argument is for moral dialogue, in which people have conversations about what is right and wrong. The idea is that new norms emerge when people participate in forming them, and because people took part in creating them, these norms become self-enforcing. Social norms have to be the foundation for the good life, as there will never be enough people to enforce rules from above (apart from for people who go way beyond accepted norms). We act in particular ways, not smoking in public, not dropping litter, not for fear of punishment, but because we think it is the right thing to do.

Liam Byrne, MP, talked about the development of an area of East Birmingham, applying some of Etzioni’s ideas to a marginalised neighbourhood. Based on this experience, he argued for ensuring safety by effective policing as a platform for giving community leaders the confidence to get involved. He made a case for public services to treat people as members of networks (families, friends), not just individuals, and pointed to community institutions as the power supply for the community.

Building self-esteem and self-confidence, creating a sense of common purpose and a shared identity were themes that ran through both of the speeches. Due to the shortness of time, we were unable to discuss as much as we would have liked some of the innovative ideas from Fellows and others participating on how this could be done. Did you have a question you wanted to ask the group or the speakers? Here are a couple of the questions I had:

Social development is not about setting limits on people, but giving them positive purposes, which they buy into because they helped to form. How can/has this moral dialogue been created in practice?

Communities are exclusive as well as inclusive, how can people who are on the margins be supported to benefit from the social support and opportunities that communities can provide?

It would be great to hear other people’s views on the question Kevin Harris posed: what policies can be put in place to stimulate informal support networks?