Community building and the necessity for radical revision

Intended or not, from the early streetcar subdivision to the current automobile subdivision, North Americans have been in the process of escaping from community for over a hundred years. In the process, they have fostered amorphous edge 'cities', abandoned inner cities, placeless public realms, and a fragmented, introverted society. Democracy is all but lost, unless community, as a central building block to humanity as well as democracy, can be rediscovered. But any rediscovery of community must be substantial; change is too readily absorbed in these times as a fad or cosmetic. Revisions to community must assume radical proportions wherein the interventions made return us to the root ideas and processes of community. The radical is, by definition, at once both fundamental and revolutionary, a source of nourishment and stability while also a source of challenge and uncertainty, and both a constitutional and a common sense concern. Only in the radical, it is asserted, can new life be found for community. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.