A Successful Community

A successful community is where everyone has the opportunity to be understood and everyone is protected from crime.  There needs to be leaders that are honest in what they say and do.  The leaders of a successful community must not be in denial of the truth and they must never turn themselves off to knowledge.  A community can prosper in a dense urban area or a remote location.  A successful community must have a transportation system based on logic and rationality as opposed to one that was arbitrarily placed there.  A successful community is one where people can live and never feel like they need a vacation from it.

To protect people from crime, a community must give everyone the opportunity to make collective decisions with the rest of the community.  The more control a person has over his surroundings, the happier he will be and the less likely he will be to commit a crime.  Honest and consistent law enforcement is necessary for a community to be successful.  It is also a must to not only enforce the law but to understand deviance and try to prevent it in the first place.  Opportunity and desire are the two things that enable crime and perhaps the desire comes from a lopsided distribution of wealth.  That is not necessarily the answer but things like that need to be seriously analyzed.

Elected officials must never participate in any form of lying.  They have to always be open to different opinions and ideas.  Recently, it was aggravating for me to listen to a presidential candidate compulsively lie.  Leaders need to be able to answer questions without worrying about how the truth will sound.  George W. Bush won the election partly because he was not afraid to be himself.  However, he was in environmental denial, which is a form of lying. 

The amount of people in a community does not determine how successful it will be.  Different people are comfortable with different amounts of people.  One person will thrive in a small community while another will thrive in a large community.  In a small town people can get to know everyone.  In a large city people can be more selective with the type of people they interact with. 

A successful community is one that does not discriminate on the basis of car ownership.  The transportation system has to safely transport people while also being safe to other things and people outside of whatever form of transportation is being used.  The exodus from cities to suburbs is deteriorating the quality of communities in the city.  Before the automobile, the economy of a city was self-policing.  The most desirable places to live were near the center of the city and therefore the most expensive.  Now, in most places in the U.S., the most desirable areas to live are away from the center of a city and city centers are deteriorating.  This form of social isolation has a negative effect of discrimination.  What needs to be put in place are Urban Growth Boundaries or some form of it in order to halt the sprawled deterioration of communities and environment—perhaps a tax system that would encourage people to gravitate towards the center of cities.  

I think it was James Howard Kunstler who theorized that Disneyland fails in countries where there are very few cars, and that is because Disneyland is so similar to everything else in that car-free country.  In America, however, Disneyland is a refreshing getaway from the way things are everywhere else in America.  A successful community, and a successful planet for that matter, is one where the automobile is not placed at the center of it.  There should be a certain area, or radius, in a city (at the center of it) where automobiles are not allowed.  From there, a certain amount of time would be given (maybe in years) before that car-free radius would be extended, and so on.  The ultimate goal in such a policy would be to gradually rejuvenate a city and therefore, its community.

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