Community based on patterned experience

Transdisciplinarity-3 as the Emergence of Patterned Experience (Part II) (Part #9)

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Community is, or should constitute, an integrative system -- transcending the specialized disciplinary concerns of its members in their various roles. Urbanization has encouraged the emergence of one kind of community sustained by the understanding of urban architects, bureaucrats, politicians and the forces of consumerism. There have been many efforts to experiment with alternative styles of community in reaction to the alienating features of such technocratic modernism. The design of 'sustainable communities' is now becoming a central political concern as a result of appreciation of the need for dramatic lifestyle changes in response to environmental constraints and concern for quality of life.

There is a dilemma with regard to community design. Many with relevant skills see it as primarily involving ecologically appropriate designs of community infrastructure -- a feature of Transdisciplinarity-1. The emphasis is placed on alternative technologies and techniques as a precondition of richer community life -- apparently ignoring the challenges of the multitude of decaying neighbourhood communities inhabited by the financially impoverished. An alternative technocracy is emerging in support of this approach. This approach sees individual behaviour as being determined by architecture and technology, improvements to the physical environment are assumed to improve the spirit and the mind. This environmentalist perspective ignores the lessons of high rise apartment buildings and other disastrous urban planning experiments.

Almost no attention is paid to the subjective experiential relationships between people -- the shared subjectivity (characteristic of Transdisciplinarity-2) through which community is given nonphysical meaning essential to the quality of community life. Indeed there is no language or methodology within which these issues can be articulated. In the design of 'eco-villages', there is no place for the softer sciences (whose views on the community experiments of the past are not solicited). And where the softer sciences are consulted, it tends to be on the externalities of governance, power structure and division of labour -- for these disciplines necessarily lack any skills in exploring experiential dimensions. Where these are valued, this leaves the subjective dimensions to be articulated by manipulative charismatic leaders, occasionally with disastrous results.

In the light of the above arguments, what is the key to a community based on pattern experience? What prevents a community from 'taking' and 'thriving'? Stress is sometimes placed on the emergence of community 'solidarity' -- whether at grassroots or global community levels. Such understanding is based on an interesting metaphoric distortion. Whyshould 'solid' be favoured over 'liquid', or over the other states of matter suggested by that metaphor? Surely a richer quality of life, consistent with the framework of Transdisciplinarity-3, would emphasize the interrelationship between these states -- especially since these are characterized by different kinds of (atomic) bonding. Community surely merits from being understood in terms of the full variety of (experiential) bondings and the processes through which they are transformed from one to another. If participants are to be considered like atoms, since when did community require regimentation (to the point of solidity) to be considered a success?

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