Net-working

 - Out and about
We live across wider and wider distances, both in a general and a daily sense; we reside a long way from other parts of our families, and travel further to visit friends, either across town for a meal, or across a continent.

Whilst it is easy to view this as the ‘break down of society’ and lament the loss of ‘traditional community and values’, such an outlook is at best platitudinal, and at worse myopic and sentimental.


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See Id of the Ingenu, October 2010, Helix street: 
‘Even though how we live is shifting, and the traditional idea of community is perhaps less common - where most people in an area work and live there - it is still important that the evolving notion of community is cultivated. We increasingly have a much wider movement ‘net’ with nodes further apart, in that we live, work and socialise in many different areas, so there is a rich nexus of overlaid social ‘nets’ that constitute places. Merely because people in a place have not come from just that locale, does not invalidate it as a cohesive [and valid] arena of activity, it just means we need to acknowledge that evolved sensed of community.’

These wider living ‘networks’, comprised of nodes more spread apart, also means that groupings are less isolated, in that certain aspects of us are plugged into a groups which are further afield. So whilst we may be less integrated from a ‘traditional’ perspective, we are actually immersed in a greater variety of arenas, which is more attuned to emerging social networking sensibilities.  

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As such, places are constituted by nodes made up of parts of a whole distributed across larger space, but each individual place is no less valid, just made up of sub-nodes whose siblings are elsewhere. So the question before us is how do we live as part of this evolved notion of community, and what are the latent tensions and their implications between the typical (accepted traditional) and the emerging living environments, and how do they overlap, as we shift from one to the other?

Further reading
For a more academic take on it, see Urban Design journal 114, spring 2010, p33.
For an environmental angle see:
Lim C J & Ed Liu, Smart Cities + Eco-warriors, 2010, Routledge, Abingdon/ New York

Interlude
If the virtual world and physical world are to engage, as they should, even just from the point of view that we should strive to live in an integrated albeit heterogeneous manner, we need to find an evolved notion of virtual space; current gaming for example is not allowing the virtual realm to develop as a medium to become and fulfil it's own nature. We have merely used it to make a representation of the physical world as an escapist sideshow.

The start of the end
Despite having many areas of vitality, the UK is a dying organism*. But the key question at this crucial point in time is, are the areas of vitality going to continue on their current path to be as parasites, feeding off the dying ‘flesh’ and pushing the country into terminal decline past a point of no return, or can these hotspots of health be enticed to return the whole back to good health?
(* in a way all organisms are dying, but there is healthy and ill. Healthy is more a state of constant renewal)

The end of the end
Fifty years of poor stewardship by misogynistic and selfish mid-twentieth century baby boomers, who (not so) incidentally have also hoarded the family silver, has left key elements of infrastructure: health, housing, education and transport, in a woeful state after half a century of minimal investment, ceding the impossible task of playing 'catch up'.

More fundamentally, the environment, the mandate having been sidelined and ignored in any meaningful sense, may now have passed a point where many options that even recently would have been available to us, have now moved beyond possibility.

There still remains twenty years of draw on health resources in their twilight years, but at least thankfully they are now retiring from positions of power and responsibility to finally allow others through.

The start of the start
These others are those currently in middle age, who will need to form a bridging generation that can peg the decline, but ultimately this can be little more than a stop-gap. At best they can perhaps begin to think, and lay in pathways or some kind of foundational framework so that the current emerging generation, free of infected thinking, can fundamentally re-consider and re-structure a way through our dire situation. Additionally, this middle generation are tasked with supporting the current graduate generation in terms of space to think freely. The beginning is merely to acknowledge that the starting is point is the nature of our current situation.

Our way forward will need to be considered from first principles, and even those need to be well reflected upon first; greed and selfishness at an endemic level cannot be part of the future. A renewed sense of the civic will probably be part if it in some interpretation.

The end of the start
It is necessarily at least a double generational task ahead of us; any less would probably mean we have not cut deep enough and any such solutions would be too superficial.