Graham Crow: 'Community Time as Community's Fourth Dimension'
In: Annotations 1: Mixed Belongings and Unspecified Destinations. Edited by Nikos Papastergiadis. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996,
pp. 58-63
When considering the subject of 'community' there is an understandable wariness about what sociologists have to say, since sociological analysis has not always brought clarity to the discussions. It is well-known that George Hillery's article on 'Definitions of community: areas of agreement' identified very little common ground among the 94 different definitions examined, and this was over forty years ago (Hillery, 1955). A similar exercise today would be able to draw on many more than 94 definitions, and would be all the less likely to arrive at any consensus regarding what community is. Taking this road again would be of limited benefit, but it is nevertheless possible to say something in very general terms about what it is that members of communities have in common. The concept of 'community time' is an important part of this discussion, as has been argued elsewhere (Crow and Allan, 1995), not least because so many of the images with which we operate are backward looking [...] sociological imaginations relating to community often take the traditional working-class community as their reference point.
The writing of Peter Willmott is a fruitful starting point in the analysis of what it is that community members have in common in contemporary society. [...] Willmott (1986) argued that there are three sorts of things which members of communities may have in common: common residence, common interests, and a common spirit of community. [...] Shared residence is the characteristic most commonly associated with the word community in everyday discourse, but Willmott's point in distinguishing this from the other two dimensions of community is that communities do not have to have common residence. Members of communities may be linked by something other than place, such as a common interest derived from membership of the same occupation, or the sense of shared identity which characterises what he calls 'communities of attachment' [...]
Making analytical distinctions between communities as places, social structures and meanings serves to challenge simplistic conceptions of 'community' as a set of social relationships which emerge automatically from physical and social contexts. [...] The analysis of the interconnectedness of places, social structures and meanings reveals that a fourth dimension of community, that of 'community time', is of vital importance. The significance of the time dimension of community relationships is revealed in Willmott's account of how it took forty years for Dagenham to become 'the East End reborn' (1963, p.109). [...] It is also the case that the time dimension of community needs to be borne in mind in relation to the survival of community traditions long after the factors which led to their creation have ceased to operate. [...]
There are many other ways in which dynamic processes are central to community relationships. [...] Communities are characterized by opposing and contradictory 'centripetal' and 'centrifugal' forces which push some members to the centre of local social life and others to the periphery. Community dynamics mean that the boundary between insiders and outsiders is not fixed over time. In addition, time plays a part in the expression of community solidarity. Communities do not simply persist, but have to be actively sustained.
REFERENCES
Crow, G. and Allan, G. (1995) 'Community Types, Community Typologies and Community Time', Time and Society 4 (2), pp.147-66.
Hillery, G. (1955) 'Definitions of community: areas of agreement', Rural Sociology 20, pp.111-23.
Willmott, P. (1963) The Evolution of a Community (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).
Willmott, P. (1986) Social Networks, Informal Care and Public Policy (London: Policy Studies Institute).