Friday, November 12, 2010

Selling My Ideal Community

I recently designed an “ideal community” for a class I am taking. The other individual I was working with and I decided that the fundamental ingredient to create an ideal community was to maximize interaction. I believe that the more connected people feel to each other the happier the entire community will become. With this in mind we designed a community that aimed to maximize community interaction through the areas of agriculture, wellness, outreach, and arts. However, it is one thing to design an ideal community and it is another thing to actually convince people to live there.

Because the fundamental idea behind this community is to maximize interaction, people who want to keep their distance and be loners most likely would not enjoy living in this community. But it was never the intention that this community would be a perfect fit for everyone. For this reason we stressed the idea that people would have the right to leave whenever they wanted. In order for an ideal community to work well people have to actually want to live there. If people are not living in a community by their own choice it will be nearly impossible to create an environment where everyone can be happy.

So while we’ve already established that this community is never going to be appealing and ideal to everyone, I believe many people would be interested in joining this community. In order to convince people to live in it, I would need to sell them on the basic idea that maximizing community interaction creates a better community. I do not believe that this would be all that hard to do because people already know this from their own lives. Many people find happiness and satisfaction in being part of social groups and organizations. Whether it’s attending church once a week, being part of a community club, or playing video games with friends on Xbox Live, people know that they can find happiness when they interact with other people and feel like they a part of something. All my community is trying to do is take what people already know and do in their own lives and put it on a larger level that encourages this same sense of community and belonging on nearly every aspect of regular everyday life. 

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