Community Resources

Definition

Community resources is Jane Jacobs's three-category inventory of what a community supplies that families cannot: the analytical core of the first pillar ("community and family," "so tightly connected they cannot be considered separately") of Dark Age Ahead (Jacobs 2004, p. 24). The concept's premise: "Two parents, to say nothing of one, cannot possibly satisfy all the needs of a family-household. A community is needed as well, for raising children, and also to keep adults reasonably sane and cheerful. A community is a complex organism with complicated resources that grow gradually and organically" (p. 34). Category one: "resources that all families need and that virtually none can provide for themselves" — mostly tangible, publicly provided: "affordable housing for all the community's members; publicly funded transportation…; water and sewage systems; fire protection; public health and safety inspections and enforcement; schools; public libraries; large-scale public recreation facilities; parks; ambulances and other emergency services" (pp. 34–35). Category two: "provided more informally by a community but… also mostly tangible" — "convenient and responsive commercial establishments, plus noncommercial (nonprofit) services initiated and maintained by volunteer citizens' groups": old people's homes, churches, concerts, festivals, sports tournaments, language classes, job training (p. 35). Category three: "thoroughly informal, thoroughly intangible, and probably the most important: speaking relationships among neighbors and acquaintances in addition to friends" (p. 35).

The concept's load is spelled out in the family's impossible job description: "Knowledge and experience sufficient to use simple home remedies… the ability to judge correctly and quickly when ills or wounds are too serious for home remedies… Ability to tutor children needing help with homework… Skill and tact at training children to shun drugs and to be cautious of strangers but not to mistrust everybody… Deal civilly with people whose upbringing, cultures, and personalities are at odds with the traditions and customs of one's own nuclear family, and teach children to be both cosmopolitan and tolerant" (p. 35). "Who are the paragons that, unaided and unadvised, can earn a living and also provide all this and more? Few of them exist. Only membership in a functioning community makes handling these responsibilities feasible" (p. 36). Its diagnostic observable: "One can drive today for miles through American suburbs and never glimpse a human being on foot in a public space, a human being outside a car or truck… This is a visible sign that much of North America has become bereft of communities" (p. 36). Its asymmetry: "One of the great strengths of New York City is that its neighborhood community efforts typically have staying power; once under way, they tend to persist not only for decades but for generations" (p. 37) — while noble individual campaigns in "social deserts" fade when the originator departs, "because no functioning community exists to carry it on" (p. 37). The concept's destruction mechanism is attrition-of-automobiles' civic face: "Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities" (p. 37) — and its loss follows the amnesia rule: "after it is lost, gradually even the memory of what was lost is lost" (p. 38). The concept is the local-scale container of redundancy-of-mentors: the mentors are the community's speaking relationships personified — "visible in a community, but invisible to the young when community becomes invisible" (p. 160).

Key Thinkers

• Jane Jacobs — the concept's author: the three categories; speaking relationships as the most important; the staying-power asymmetry (2004).
• Eric Klinenberg (not yet paged — see log) — the concept's strongest empirical confirmation: South Lawndale's elderly surviving the 1995 heat wave through exactly the speaking relationships (storekeepers as refuge, trusted checkers) that North Lawndale's commercial desert lacked (via Heat Wave, discussed in Jacobs 2004, pp. 83–85).

Related Concepts

• social-capital — the scholarly concept nearest to category three; Jacobs's speaking relationships are its informal, spoken, un-institutionalized form.
• mass-amnesia — the loss mechanism: community memory dying with its bearers ("even the memory of what was lost is lost," p. 38).
• attrition-of-automobiles — the destroyer: the automobile's road-building as the chief community-killer, via Robert Moses's "master obliterator" career.
• redundancy-of-mentors — the personnel of category three: varied individuals filling cultural roles "by the way."
• eyes-on-the-street — the 1961 predecessor: the sidewalk's informal social control as the street-scale form of the same resource.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Dark Age Ahead (Jacobs 2004) — the two-parent impossibility premise and the three categories (pp. 34–35); the family job description (p. 35); the suburban social desert and the human-on-foot diagnostic (p. 36); the energetic-individual failure and New York's staying power (p. 37); the automobile as chief destroyer and the GM transit conspiracy (pp. 37–41); the memory-lost miniature (p. 38); the Klinenberg heat-wave contrast (pp. 83–85); the coercive-households intuition (prisons, p. 43); the migration context ("Never were communities more needed," p. 42).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Dark Age Ahead ingest; awaits community-sociology sources and the third-place literature (Oldenburg) as its neighborhood.

Open Questions

• The concept's third category ("speaking relationships") is deliberately un-institutional: not organizations but talk. Can design supply it — or only destroy it? Jacobs's diagnostics suggest the latter (roads and culs-de-sac destroy; nothing is built as community). Does the wiki's eyes-on-the-street and public-characters material from 1961 supply the positive design programme this 2004 concept lacks?
• Is the three-category scheme a theory of subsidiarity at household scale — the community as the "level of government" closest to family needs? If so, the first pillar and the fourth pillar are one argument: institutions too far away to know the needs cannot supply them (subsidiarity).
• Klinenberg's heat-wave case makes the category-three resource literally life-saving (40 vs. fewer-than-4 deaths per 100,000). Does this convert community from an amenity into survival infrastructure — and if so, does the wiki's interior-centered research programme need a "community as life-support" register to match?