in pursuit of community

Thoughts on 9/11

2011-09-11T13:08:00.000-07:00

What am I thinking about on this day of 9/11/11 the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11/01?

Well, I'm thinking of the fact that we (as in humanity but probably mostly Western societies) are heading towards self-destruction on a number of different levels and we're mostly occupied with pretending not to realise and ignoring these realities.

On a global-political level we are heading towards the next big superpower conflict or at least an increased level of bloody proxy wars because the global balance of power is rapidly changing and the main participants in the Great Game are behaving like England and Germany in the early 19th century.

Environmentally a small part of humankind is pulling away the rug of livelihood from under the feet of everybody and only realising at a snail's pace that it might be affected too at some point.

Economically we keep on finding new ingenious ways to exploit each other and ourselves for our money and our effort.

Socially we keep ever increasing the number of dividing lines between us, fighting endless shadow-wars with imagined enemies projected onto the wall by our own media.

The worst part of it is however that we are hardly recognising what is going on but instead occupy ourselves with distractions, projections and 'shadow' problems like the local conflicts, the "clash of civilisations" or "immigration".

Especially on this tragic day of 9/11, can we please stop wallowing in self-indulgence and defending the current state of Western societies as any kind of ideal but use the momentum of shock and grief to reflect on how we should seek to attain something better? Just think about this - how can it be that only after the horrific event of the 9/11 attacks did Americans witness a momentary "coming together", a growth of social trust, as Tina Brown claimed in a recent BBC interview? How 'good' is this society really?

I mean come on, it's a main-stay statement that capitalism isn't the best system there is but it's the least bad system we've been able to create. Despite all the wealth it creates for a few that manage to ride the dragon it also constantly generates major problems and costs. It constantly destroys its own social base by always seeking new ways to accumulate capital. We have just witnessed the collapse of the latest of these capital-accumulating schemes in the form of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and all the lasting damage this continues to cause to millions of lives. Until we can come up with a better system, capitalism needs to be checked, it needs to be balanced out, forced to invest a guaranteed share of its generated profits into healing the cultural and social wounds it constantly inflicts, just to keep it from destroying our societies. A healthy distrust of this machine is in order not an ever-closer embrace of the economy with every other aspect of our lives and that of the planet as is currently being promoted as the solution in the face of governments' fiscal impotence caused by bailing out system-critical banks.

The modern world we created for ourselves to live and work in is extremely taxing and not an ideal one for any of us to live in. As mentioned above - the fact that it took a massive terrorist attack as 9/11 to bring people in New York and America to trust and help each other more shows that we haven't arrived in any kind of 'good' society.

What is preventing us from admitting this to ourselves then and discussing it on this very day? Maybe we are already too invested in the status quo, too hopeful that we will be amongst the select few to make it to an acceptable level of comfort at the expense of all those who don't. Is that why we so anxiously cling to the wreckage of this society and won't even mention our own discomfort with the way things are even when they go so horribly wrong? But for how many is that hope actually going to come true?

And even if it was to come true what does that hoped for privilege of an "acceptable level of comfort" look like? Is it to work our asses off for living in our own house where we can then hate the neighbours, worry about the house-price declining, own two cars that sweeten the way to the hated workplace, have fancy kitchen appliances that beep and break at an accelerating rate, and get so estranged from our partner that we divorce them we're 45 and require counselling for the rest of our lifetime. Sounds like a bum deal to me.

Unless we use today to think about how we can honour the dead by promising to keep trying to make our world a better place for everybody I think we shame their memory.

Imagine life in the machine – just look behind you in the mirror

2010-10-07T16:08:00.001-07:00

Imagine for a moment the world before humanity dominated it. A blue planet, trundling through space with no particular purpose or reason. Life on the planet was all about just eking out an existence, always eager to procreate and evolve purely for survival's and procreations' sake.

Now imagine the world, as it is today, inhabited by humans: think of it, just for the sake of an experiment as some kind of huge factory, filled with giant machines of different sizes and functions, constantly running. All these different kinds of machines running and running, making something, producing something. What kinds of machines? Well, there'd be machines of different sizes and of different purpose, just like there are countries of different size and purpose. There would be some machines closely integrating their production lines, while others would be barely getting much input from others while still producing outputs needed by other machines. The different machines would all be running at vastly different, ever changing speeds, using different and evolving technologies.

What happens within these machines? Well, in the same way that the big machines are ultimately all part of the factory each of the big machines contains smaller sub-machines, with conveyor belts, pistons and mechanisms linking all the machinery up in some way or another. Equivalent to a countries' institutions really, businesses, universities, governments, organisations, all grouped and linked in various ways – as cities, industries, communities and what have you not.

At that level finally, that's where people fit in – if we imagine the world in this way, each and every one of us living in this planet earth would fit into this machine somewhere. We'd ultimately be the ones making all these machines run. The machines need us to make them run. Well, we're of course trying to get out of that and that's why we invented computers. But for now that's still mostly the way it is. All the machines need people to make them run. How do we keep them running – well, there's work of course, but pretty much everything we do - from watching TV to cooking a dinner to walking the dog - keeps some machine somewhere humming away busily.

Talk about what is power – power is the ability to change the course of a machine

Machines provide for humans, they keep us alive but at the same time they suck life out of us. With all of our lives being ruled by machines, keep the machines running becomes the main reason for humans to live. The only open question will be how comfortably we will be living and for a few whether they can maybe influence the production mechanism of some of the machines.

Struggles between humans about resource distribution, social justice etc. are about adjustments to the production - whom the machine produces what goods for, how much profit it makes or how many things, how fast it runs etc.

Next question – why do we keep them running?

Of course, one could say it was and is people who created all these machines in the first place so it's just fair that we'd be keeping them running. After all we created them for a purpose. What, however, is that purpose? What are all these many many machines producing, what are they making and for whom? Now, one can take one of these machines, let's take a fairly explicit example, the cigarette vending machine around the corner from here. This machine has the obvious purpose of distributing cigarettes. It will be doing so for a fee. This small machine can of course not act on its own accord but is merely the tip of an iceberg. The iceberg is the company that owns that machine, that caused it to be placed around the corner from here, that causes the machine to be refilled with cigarettes once it's empty, maintained etc. Why then did the company, the big "mother machine" feel the urge to expose its little, vulnerable "baby" of a cigarette vending machine into the bad and dangerous world? To hand out cigarettes to the smokers in the area yes, but ultimately to make money for the mother machine. Because, that is currently the ultimate goal of most machines on this planet. Making money. One would think their inventors gave birth to them to make humanities' lot easier – for example by making cigarettes available 24/7 for those poor deprived smokers in our neighbourhood. But the big mother machine of a company placed this cigarette machine in that place for one purpose only – to make profit if possible. Because that is by now the most popular carrot that has been chosen to make most machines on this planet run at a higher speed. Because you see, humans are still needed to run the machines and humans are so bloody difficult to motivate to keep the machines running. You offer them money, of course never as much as their work is actually worth but something but then with time they get lazy. So if you want to keep the machines running nice and smooth and keep improving their speed and efficiency you need a nice and juicy carrot and that's profit, money, dough, that stuff.

Some machines used to be trained at producing just things, things that people could use or not. But those machines didn't quite run at the same speed, they didn't have the agility to adapt quickly to the changes in what people wanted and what they produced quickly became quite outdated. Well, that said, they ultimately never really produced what people wanted in the first place but were focussed on being competitive with other machines. Anyway, they lost out so now it's pretty much only money-producing machines around. Of course those machines also produce things for people to stay alive, life comfortably, make them miserable, entertain them, make them happy, destroy them and all that sort of rubbish but ultimately it's money they produce.

That hints at another important factor in this mechanical landscape – competition between machines.

Tied up in this constant wrangle, various machines are always focussed on becoming ever more efficient, fast and smooth-running – the digital revolution for example is about integrating humans and their environment completely into the machine's thinking to make its production decisions more efficient. By living ever more of our lives in the machine code of 0 and 1 we make our lives comprehensible and computable to machines. Human lives become calculable, thereby increasing efficiency of the production of the goods and services to support that life and ultimately a bigger yield in profits.

How charities can survive the conservative government

2010-09-06T14:57:00.001-07:00

OK, so maybe the expansion of public spending in the UK over the last 13 years was extraordinary. But so was the tax-income from the growing financial sector. That the public deficit was still allowed to grow so large on serves to show that the highly profitable sectors weren't taxed enough. The City managed to scare the government into thinking it would take flight if taxes were raised and would leave Labour's social transformation plans with no money to go on.

With the current retreat of public spending expected to go on across industrialised countries over the next 5-10 years what are NGOs to do to sustain their work? Reliance on government funding has created a lot of jobs in the sector but also dependence on the political whims of changing governments. The whims over the last 13 years were relatively positive with regards to the availability of funding, now they are not so charities are squealing in fear. Not that charity work over the last 13 years has made much difference on anything but the individual level. Most social charities' fallacy has been that they have accepted the terms of the market economy and focus on either issues of access to opportunities and on encouraging individual action in the form of "raising aspirations"/"helping people fulfil their potential". The lack of a structural understanding and approach to the problems of poverty, social exclusion or racism for example have confined the work of most social welfare charities to the role of temporary patches and their directors to managers focussed on running services smoothly and cost-effectively rather than visionaries. The approach of using the tax-income from a few boom-sectors of the economy to finance an expanding social-welfare programme is inherently flawed as the highly profitable sectors keep on creating and exacerbating the problems that the charities are trying to fix - wage exploitation in low-earning and low-skilled jobs, perpetual unemployment, a consumer society.

Coming back to charities - some might be able to rely on private donations to sustain their work. Most will enter the increased competition for an ever-shrinking market of public and trust-funded projects. Many charities will go under or merge. Even until now, serious money has only come from the state or from very very large scale operations by national charities so how could one expect the private donor and trust fund market to pick up the slack.

If we are to think then about a potential solution, the question is about alternative sources of income for charities to substitute the public money. Doing what charities do well they could try and sell the services they do well like training, "art by homeless people", people participation, advice etc. all this might generate some money but it will be peanuts in comparison to current funding levels and private businesses do this much cheaper and maybe even better, so charities would have to become pretty much private businesses to deliver the services effectively.

No, in order to take serious strides towards implementing any kind of social change agenda charities have to find access to serious amounts of capital which can regenerate itself as well as generating operating capital for the charities' programmes. So the question is - where could this money come from? Should charities invest in highly profitable industries to "suck" profits out of the system and divert them towards their progressive work? Of course such a situation with charities as shareholders would suffer from the same fundamental flaw as the New Labour approach detailed above - the source of the funds generates the very problems the charity is trying to remedy. Thus rather than aiming to abolish itself as all charities should strive to, the charity would actively sustain the negative situation that it should abolish. Of course, if one denies the links between profit-extraction and social exclusion or poverty this line of argument fails. OK so maybe charities would have to find "ethical" sources of profit to create independent sources of wealth.

The point is though - for serious social change work an organisation needs an independent financial basis and cannot be dependent upon fluctuating public sector funding or the often small-fry and restricted trust-fund money.

Charity where artst thou you going?

2009-05-13T05:42:00.001-07:00

Working for charities in the UK has made me wonder about a couple of things:

1. How come project funding from government is never enough to cover the full costs of running the projects? Where can charities then get the remainder of the funding from to make their activities sustainable?

2. How come charities are constantly being played off against each other in competition for funding?

3. Could charities really exist to the same extent as today without the input of young, energetic students and job-starters who are willing to work a lot of overtime for little or even no money in exchange for the hope of at some point getting a better job?

4. How can charities be trusted to handle responsibly the conflict of interest of serving those who are in need but at the same time “selling” that need to the ones who fund them?

5. Who should charities be serving – their funders or their “clients”?

6. How can charities’ clients be given an effective stake in the social services delivered to them and how can their experience be used as feedback on the service provided?

City

2008-12-02T15:58:00.000-08:00

City – born from our questions to the world around us, created by our desires

City – mirrors to our selves – yet all we see is you

City – symbols and signs make you appear in our minds

City – you live and you die from our oxygen supply

City – we pray to the stuff at the heart of your existence

City – we pray to the tools of your sustenance

City – you kill all human emotion between us yet

City – you make us dance together in desire and hate

City - you hold the key to our soul hidden in your folds

City - you make us look for nothing but yourself

One day, city, our desires will desert you

and fly free to build a city in our own image,

which will welcome us in her warm embrace and you

will be nothing but dust in the streets of a city.

Urban Manifesto

2008-11-15T15:53:00.001-08:00

City Basics

The city as infrastructure: A city should enable all of its inhabitants to work and live in it as they wish and to facilitate this as smoothly and conveniently as possible.
But! A city is not just an economic machine!
The processes of work and life create frictions, conflicts, contests between the city's inhabitants and these conflicts are played out over every aspect of the city.
A city should give room for these societal processes and conflicts to play themselves out.
A city has the responsibility of a referee to maintain a level playing ground among its inhabitants in shaping the city.
A city should channel constructively the forces and energies that the work and life processes of its inhabitants generates.
A city should bring people together, foster a city-society and community across all lines of conflict.
A city needs to force all of its inhabitants to confront each other (in the form of acknowledging each other's existence) and to recognise each other as equal members of the same society.
The city belongs to everyone who wants to participate in it! Those who do not want to participate in it don't own the city.

Advanced aspects of the City

The inspiring city
A city should inspire its inhabitants and non-inhabitants to see it as more than an economic machine and to see themselves as more than economic agents. The city should inspire its inhabitants to constantly seek to develop themselves as individuals and to develop their community and society.
The reflective city
The city is a diamond - it gives you an infinite number of reflections of yourself and the world around you with every turn. The city allows you to know yourself and the world around you like nothing else can.
A city should be reflective - looking at itself in all its realities and making its inhabitants look at "themselves" and each other - a city should not be afraid to look at itself. This reflective power should be strengthened and utilised.
The city and its past (limited path-dependency)
- All cities are born out of a certain context which defines their purpose/goal
  - That purpose/goal can change over time - it is, if not consciously, still man-made
- The context and route taken towards reaching the "goal" frame the city's capacity to fulfil the tasks and challenges outlined in this manifesto
  - for example: some cities have inherently more potential to be open/creative/individualistic etc. than others
- Cities should focus on interpreting their original purpose/goal within their changing context and constantly probing its validity anew in a reflective exercise involving all inhabitants of the city on an equal basis
The DIY city
A city should provide the space and tools for its inhabitants to create themselves the spaces that suit them.
The welcoming city
A city should be open and welcoming to new inhabitants.

City structure

To ensure that the above characteristics of the city are realised the city should be seen through the following structural framework:

The city as a beehive:
- Every inhabitant should be provided with a minimum standard of his/her own space to live, comfort and realise themselves
- All inhabitants need to know they are part of the bigger unit
- This is a hands-off area for governance - there should be as little interference in the individual's space as possible.
The city as a fractal:
- Individual (beehive) units group themselves together into bigger units and those group themselves into bigger units and so on - this creates the high level of complexity of the city
- These various groupings overlap according to space, identity - different levels of community/identity.
The city comes alive on the "spaces in between" - its pathways:
- To ensure that the city comes alive in the "spaces in between" it needs to bring its inhabitants and the groupings in which they are organised to meet each other/confront each other on the pathways criss-crossing the city
- Pathways include the entire infrastructure of the city - physical, economic, social, cultural, virtual, emotional
- The city needs to ensure equal access for all its inhabitants to the pathways
- The city needs to ensure openness of its pathways towards outsiders
- The city needs to ensure fairness of the rules governing the pathways
- The city needs to ensure that everybody is connected to the pathways network

Other Urban Manifestos

You are here!

2008-08-10T07:24:00.000-07:00

So it's been almost 5 months now - time for a re-assessment. Let's re-assess - I guess that's what those pigeons doing a threesome outside my window were thinking as well and see what's come of it.
By now London has lost most of its shock-value, but not its novelty. A daily routine has established itself, marked by hour-long unpleasant travel on the underground to and from work in the Northern outskirts of the city. Very interesting - these outskirts of London. This is where most of London's population lives, yet it is so unlike London - typically suburban, they could be anywhere at all and for the most part its inhabitants stay within those boundaries. Despite this personal indifference towards London professionally the small NGO I am working for benefits tremenduously from being "in" London. International guests want to visit our conference, we get business because there's so many beneficiaries around whom we can serve. But I guess on a personal level London is just too intense to continuously expose yourself to it in the long term.

On the other hand, I have become more and more suprised with London's "normality". Rarely do I encounter London to be some kind of crazy, ultra or post-modern urban laboratory. Areas of homeliness, cosiness and retreat are everywhere, be it in the form of pubs, quiet and green Victorian streets, old double-decker busses. Is that a contradiction? Of course there is always Canary Wharf, that ultra-modern anti-London, which has done away with all those niches of the old. But then again that's just a boring copy of North-American downtowns, nothing new, nothing special.

So the question stands - is London really at the forefront of contemporary urban development as some seem to suggest or is it just a big layered over mix of old and new that can't really motivate itself to go backward or forward. And if it were at the forefront, what proposed trajectory for urban development would London stand for?

Interesting point in addition: Londoners have been eagerly watching and commenting on yesterday's Olympic opening ceremony for Beijing 2008, of course thereby discussing and formulating expectations for the London 2012 Olympic games. Can London really put on such a magnificient, over-awing and perfectionistic show, requiring a superbly unified political will as well as absolute control and organisational power over a lot of people? Can London really strive for that? I have my doubts in all those respects - even if London had the money to put on such games, how could it politically justify such one-sided expenditure towards its voting population? I don't think it could nor should it do so. Instead the city should think about how it can make a big splash in its own way, in a London way. How about making it the most socially, environmentally and financially sustainable Olympics ever with the most public involvement, the most volunteer involvement - Olympics for the people. (I know that's not at all a new idea but it feels good to say it anyway).

Urban Confrontation in London

2008-04-19T16:00:00.001-07:00

€€

unexpected effects of a hyper-urban confrontation

Having lived in Guatemala for the last year, it was clear that moving to London would mean quite a big deal for us and bring about big changes to our lives. However, the psychological effects of this confrontation with urban reality have been quite unexpected and unprecedented.

I have lived in many cities, admittedly B-list and C-list cities like Chemnitz, Trieste, Vancouver, Utrecht, and Brussels. Still, I would consider myself familiar with many aspects of urban life. So London's sheer size was not an issue, nor was its incredible population density anything surprising.

IDENTIFY YOURSELF

Anyway, coming from the rural experience and jumping right into hyper-urbanity provides some interesting insight into this urbanity's psychological effects on the concerned individual. First of all, being confronted with, this city's incredible social, cultural, ethnic etc. diversity poignantly poses identity questions: Who exactly are you? Where do you place yourself? To what group do you belong? What do you drink? Identify yourself? Of course nobody asks you directly and on the street everyone makes sure to demonstrate how they couldn't care less if you were a lump of undefined, baggy anti-matter. Still, most Londoners carry at least some identity right on their sleeves, either a carefully manufactured one or a naturally carelessly donned one. Of course office workers are seen displaying hyper-elegant dress, discretely showing off its noble ascendancy. But even artists and generally "alternative-to-the-mainstream" folk sport carefully manicured retro appearance, perfected from makeup to second-hand vintage. Walking the streets of London one constantly wonders through a forest of publicly broadcasted identities, which somehow seems to urge you: identify yourself! How active social pressure can be even in the most anonymous urban context.

ECONOMIC IDENTIFICATION PRESSURES AND THE LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS

Now Bertine and me have not only moved to London to frolic and savour delicious baked beans and minced pie but have actually – surprise surprise – come to work and live here. Endeavouring out on the hunt in London's job-jungle adds another heavy weight on the scale urging you to finally shed all those extra identity kilos and slim down to something easily recognisable and most importantly marketable. Competition for every single job is so incredibly intense (as in the previous paragraph, the source of the described effect is something like a law of large numbers in people) and there are always so many very qualified people applying even for the last lousy support job that you are reduced to applying for just those jobs where the most short-sighted HR person calls out about your CV: Hallelujah, it's the messiah we've been waiting for! As mentioned – the urban condition exerts heavy pressures on the identification screw, seemingly forcing the individual to clarify his/her public image and identity in dress and self-presentation.

So far so good. Economic and social pressures are considerably stronger in a city, especially in a metropolis such as London. This results in the fact that the average individual will feel urged to publicly declare itself as part of some professional or lifestyle group in dress, attitude, behaviour and lifestyle. Switching between groups is possible of course – but you have to legitimise your switch with a complete outfit change. That is how parallel lives and schizophrenia are born.

Being new to this game this makes me wonder– what was so bad about my identity so far: less clearly defined and delimited, more flexible and accommodating, inclusive. Was I less of a person or an individual before I came to London? How do we know whether the urban identity we adapt for social and economic pressure reasons really reflects us in our entirety and complexity? Don't we turn into cartoons of ourselves – simplified, easily recognisable and intelligible figures? Might we not with time get lost in a maze of developed and groomed images of ourselves, unable to capture the "core" behind it all any longer? Are these images then enough to fill a life and to give meaning?

Of course, first of all the parallel living option is always open to explore other identities – the daytime secretary turns rave girl at night to dance out all that's been left undanced. Of course, urban identities can also be of help to those lost in a maze of self-exploration, provide a comforting certainty and frame of reference, reassuring identifiers of "us" and "them" in an endless sea of anonymous faces. But still I wonder whether it's all such a good idea.

Guatemala behind Europe ahead

2008-02-01T14:43:00.000-08:00

So Guatemala, farewell and thanks for all the fish (yes, Guatemalan fish soup or ceviche is indeed quite excellent).
It's been an incredibly intense year full of adventure, exploration of terra incognita, life on the edge, and so much learning. What can I say in conclusion? Of course it's been an exciting year, great to learn Spanish, get to know the Guatemalan way of life. It's been very very inspiring and it has changed me. It has taught me a different way life, taught me to focus on the truly important things of life like hanging out with friends and take everything else not so serious. It taught me to think twice when I say that I have everything in my life under control because I really don't. Guatemalans are amazing in their capacity to cope with adverse life situations, in their trust and faith in that everything will turn out well. They are amazing in their capacity to forgive a person, to be generous and to be welcoming.

Of course here comes the BUT. Back from Guatemala, I was surprised how little of reverse culture shock I had. I have been really enjoying the more of comfort, security and ethnic and cultural diversity present in Europe. I guess that makes me a decadent yupee but never to late to recognize yourself, right!

Despite the lack of reverse culture shock there were some significant insights though about the particularities of contemporary European lifestyle and culture:

In the lives of people "cultural" events in the widest sense have an amazing importance - concerts, art, food, museum visits etc. Next to their work and family that seems to be the major motivating force over people's lifespan, at least for middle class people. Maybe even equal to family in importance (while in Guatemala family definitely comes first).
This kind of quest for beauty in all kinds of forms and shapes like music, fashion and art as content for life, is a luxury that few people in Guatemala can afford.
Visiting the German capital of Berlin delivers a prime example for this trend in increased importance of cultural industries, especially for urban economies. The city is full with galleries, museums, fashion stores, concert halls, museums, etc. Tourists are flocking here in search for the Berlin Feeling - an alternative, relaxed, beauty-and-pleasure seeking culture-centred lifestyle. Meanwhile other industries of the city have been almost dead for years and have little chance of reviving. That not enough, with big national parties like the love parade or the soccer world cup 2006, Berlin has branded itself successfully as Germany's national party stage where the new fun-loving and tolerant Germany goes crazy.

Another example is my own home town of Chemnitz. An old, depressed post-industrial town with high unemployment rate and little of the old industry left it has now two major modern art museums, one of which was newly opened. These museums are seen as a sign that the town is doing better and hopes are high that they will bring turn Chemnitz into a cultural tourist location.
Is the increasing importance of cultural industries a sign of European decadence? Are our cities becoming mere open-air museums of a past industrial age? Can culture and the quest for "beauty" the only major content of life that makes it worth living?

Seeking beauty in all kinds of forms and shapes like music, fashion and art as content for life is a luxury that few people in Guatemala can afford of course and you could say that with all the poverty and need in the world, focussing so excessively on the beautiful things in life is cynical, perverted and disgusting. I have to agree to the point that Europeans are amazingly self-centred. Just now I read that every year 7 Million people visit only the city of Berlin. That's not only about twice that city's population, it's also ca. 6 times the number of visitors Guatemala saw in 2006 (ca. 1,4 Mio). But Guatemala needs it so much more than Berlin!

All that European affluence, decadence and lack of the so fundamental problems that Guatemala faces every day make so many European issues seem irrelevant, childish to even think about. But then again - visiting Berlin I see that Europe can also be a laboratory where exciting new things are tried out and invented, technical and service inventions of course but also social and cultural inventions (that's what I'm interested in) for example like post-national citizenship and
new syntheses between cultures. That's were places like Europe are important and unique in the world, that's were they need and should to fulfill an important role in the world. In comparison to the United States, which of course claims to be just as much a social and cultural laboratory, Europe however, continues to offer the comfort of social market systems and the ensured openness for diverse debate which are key to ensure the fair encounter and equal exchange of diverse peoples, rather than their perpetual competition.

Only if Europe falls into the trap of indulging in its security and luxuries largely for their own sake will it become irrelevant and die.

Vancouver - Antigua: one coast different worlds

2006-12-30T14:32:00.001-08:00

The last weeks have brought me long ways along America's Pacific coast which is such a rich assembly of cultures, landscapes and people hard to come by anywhere else. However, the same waves breaking all along this coast from Alaska to Chile obviously create hardly any feeling of community among the people experiencing them.

Four years of living at the northern end of America's pacific coast in Vancouver have left me very tired and disillusioned with the low levels of all-day civic culture in those parts. Maybe it was the big city, maybe it was the rainy "weather" - but riding a bus with 50 people of whom 40 are shielding themselves from most social conversation and interaction with their headphones, a feeling of alienation sets in. Language is not a problem so what is? When mentioning the "low levels of all-day civic culture" I obviously neglected especially Vancouver's high level of civic organization and interaction. Numerous NGOs, volunteer-centers and people's passionate involvement in public activities like parades and festivities is astonishing. Yet on the bus everyone still shields themselves from each other. Vancouver's social capital is more one of groups rather than a inter-group one. I guess that is called bonding social capital rather than bridging one. The common embrace of Web 2.0's social blessings exposes and enforces that trend. Individuals can prefigure in virtual ways the kind of people and the kind of group they might like to meet with before arranging an actual encounter. Of course, everybody remembers chance encounters which one whished to be over sooner rather than later. Pre-selecting whom one is going to meet reduces such mis-investments of social energy. MySpace and Facebook probably derive their popularity from such common frustrations and disappointments and thus this kind of social capital is thriving in Vancouver.

A few thousand miles further South I have spend the last 2 days in Antigua, Guatemala . My Spanish is limited at best but actually I would not even need any of it to experience an amazing forthcomingness of many people around me. Antigua is a very touristy city, its inhabitants would have all the opportunity to get jaded about yet another foreigner trying to barter with them in tortured Spanish. Yet they are not. A smiling face on the street always earns you many smiles back, and on the bus it's never quiet even with 10 people - well, no one owns an ipod either so I guess that limits the options. Judging from a very superficial, first encounter I am left with the suspicion that Antigua's social capital is more inclusive, more bridging rather than bonding. Does it have something to do with different levels of wealth; is it a "Catholic thing", maybe different levels of available social networking infrastructure in Vancouver and Antigua? Does Antigua lack Vancouver's cultural diversity, which could facilitate cross-communal social capital formation? Well, that one does seem rather doubtful already – Antigua in particular has a very diverse population consisting of foreigners, natives, and people of mixed origin, all of whose ethnic differences are probably enforced by drastic social and economic differences. So I would like to test the thesis that Guatemala has more bridging social capital and in this coming year I am hoping to dive much deeper into Guatemala's social universe to understand what is really going on.

Community Development Masters Programs in Europe

2006-12-13T14:04:00.001-08:00

Having encountered quite the trouble with finding comprehensive information on where to take a masters on community development in Europe I want to make the information I collected available here. If you have any comments on any of these programs or would like to add a program in another country (especially non-UK) you are more than welcome to email me about it.

United Kingdom:

1. University of Edinburgh - MSc in Community Education - link

2. London School of Economics - MSc in Health, Community and Development - link

3. University of Westminster - Masters in Community Development - link

4. University of Cambridge - Master of Studies in Social Enterprise and Community Development - link

5. London Metropolitan University - MSc in Organisation and Community Development - link

6. Oxford Brookes University - MA in Humanitarian and Development Practice - link

7. Durham University - MA in Community and Youth Work - link

8. Queen Mary College (University of London) - MAs in Cities and Cultures (might not seem directly connected to community development but you can probably focus your thesis on community development in an urban context) - link

9. De Monfort University of Leicester - B.A. Honours in Youth and Community Development and various MAs in Community Development - link 1
link 2

10. University of Glamorgan - MSc Community Regeneration - link

The Netherlands:

8. University of Amsterdam - MSc in Social Policy and Urban studies - link

9. Institute for Social Studies in the Hague - various MAs - link

Germany:

10. University of Applied Sciences Munich - MA in Community Development - link

11. Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin - various MAs - link

12. Koblenz University of Applied Sciences - MA in International Social Work and Community Development Studies - link

Sweden:

13. Lund University - Master in International Development and Management - link

14. Baltic University - Masters course in Sustainable Community Development and Urban Planning - link

France:

15. American University in Paris - Master of Arts in International Affairs, Conflict Management and Civil Society Development - link

Community Development is unfortunately a fairly new academic category in Europe even though all the elements it consists of have been practiced here for ages. However, cultural and academic arrogance might have contributed to making Europeans think they had no need to specifically develop their communities. Tellingly the closest thing to community development one could have studied was "International Development" - the rest of the world might need to develop its communities; Europe had no such necessity. North America on the other hand with its large number of newly founded communities was much more open about combining all the disciplines involved in developing communities into one, thereby reinventing "Community Development".

During the 90's European countries have been waking up to the fact that they were not culturally homogenous, that they were increasingly immigrant societies and countries. Problems of cultural, political, and social integration associated with that development have made the need for an embrace of community development painfully clear. Educational institutions have been reacting slowly to the increase in demand. The UK is probably quite far ahead in terms of the number of established programs, also having the advantage of an already established Bachelor/Masters system. Other countries have been busy introducing that system and on top of that combining several old areas of study to create new "sexy" disciplines. Thus, one encounters the problem of naming - community development will rarely be the title of a program in Germany or the Netherlands. Social work, social policy, social management but also urban studies or rural studies are some of the more likely titles of the programs.

Deep Community

2006-12-12T22:15:00.000-08:00

Morgan Scott Peck (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Scott_Peck), while known mostly for his "Road less travelled" self-help book, also wrote about community development. According to him there were three stages in the maturing of a community: pseudocommunity, chaos and emptiness.
The first stage, pseudocommunity, is marked by shallow friendliness, an avoidance of dissonance and lack of trust and knowledge of each other.
The second stage, chaos, exhibits fights, discussions, arguments and diverging opinions and prejudices about each other being brought out into the open.
Finally, emptiness, is the stage in which the waves calm down again and community members, now knowing each other at a deep level, truly trust each other. The term emptiness refers to the fact that in order to belong to a "deep community" one needs to empty oneself of parts of one's individuality and egotism. One needs to give up part of oneself and become part of the bigger community.
Interesting enough, this concept is currently employed mostly in the context of corporate team-building for small groups of people. Peck however, believed that achieving the level of deep community was the only chance of survival for humankind. Would it really be possible or even desirable to practise it at a larger, societal level?
Of course the currently much publicized as much as feared "clash of civilizations" between "Islamic" culture and the "West" shows the dangers of persisting in a stage of global pseudocommunity. Practicing superficial tolerance without true acceptance of each other's divergent values and opinions can possibly lead to severe conflict, especially when coupled with economic and political inequality. However, a very real personal limit to how many people one can deeply relate to makes deep community on a global level simply unfeasible. The difficulty of changing the behavior of mass societies has always prompted reliance on automatic incentive mechanisms (like Adam Smith's invisible hand) rather than the encouragement of individual moral decision making for the common good. Going through Peck's stages of community development however, requires a lot of individual goodwill and determination to make this community thing work. Corporate team-workers might have that motivation even if only to get advancement credits within their company. The crucial question however is to find what it needs to make the dock-worker from Alexandria, Egypt and the CITY insurance broker gather the motivation to take that road less travelled.

How many tears does a butterfly cry when summer is over?

2006-10-16T23:34:00.000-07:00

Cry Baby!

Questions as a way to discover and change the World

2006-10-15T22:53:00.000-07:00

Questions are a way of obtaining knowledge. Being a person with a wide range of more or less shallow knowledge rather than a very specialist expertise in one field (i.e. a generalist) questions are ideal for me to find out things about other people and learn from them. I get to engage people in a conversation and learn from them at the same time. However, humility is a crucial condition for this to work out of course. Pride prevents you from asking questions and learning from others. Acquiring knowledge by asking questions also requires one to be a peace with oneself and the world. If one is not at peace but feels the urge to assert oneself over ones surrounding - for example by telling others how something works, rather than asking them about it - then it is very hard to find good questions to ask and to be successful in learning this way.

Asking questions is also a very important trait for working in community development as I want to do. The danger for community development is to approach it like a teacher - to lecture people about what one thinks is the right way to run a community and then be surprised about the lack of enthusiasm. What should rather happen is that one enables a community to realise its potential and maybe go a bit beyond that. Asking questions to the members of a community is a crucial way to explore their perception of reality. At the same time, the process of thinking about the question might increase the consciousness about the reality around us. That opening can then be used to engage people more in their community and to increase overall community participation.

Therefore, I have to learn to ask the right questions and not being afraid of asking them. Any advice on how to get there is highly welcome!

Who paints the grass green every morning before dawn?

2006-10-15T15:35:00.000-07:00

Warum gibt es Schoenheit - Why is there beauty?

2006-10-14T19:47:00.000-07:00

Finding good questions is hard work I realized today. It is a philosophical task to find questions you do not know the answer to. Questions which make people stop in their walk and think "I had never really thought about that." Questions which strike you as much as the impossibly floating rocks of Magritte. Children, philosophers and artists are the ones who usually ask the best questions. Why all this fuss about questions? Questions dare the mind to move, questions ask for something and we might have to go out of our way to get it. The path is the goal and not the answer is the important process here but the act of searching for it. That creates mental awakeness and consciousness of the world we live in and the choices we make to maintain it as it is. I am currently in a state in which I have a lot of problems with what is going on around me but cannot confidently say how it all should be improved. In fact, maybe it could not be improved at all. That is what I want to find out and questions are the tool of my pursuit.

Question of the Day

2006-10-13T13:59:00.000-07:00

Asking Questions - is that not the best way to intellectually and morally survive in this world? Only as long as we do not have to answer them though.

Here is my question of the day: What would make one warthog think it is better than the next warthog?

Beyond the Jesus-Way

2006-10-12T21:01:00.002-07:00

I am here in Canada since 2002 and usually I am pretty adabtable person. Yet, since I am working, my cynicism about this country and its people is becoming worse and worse. Riding the bus I cannot help but think that people here are extremely vain and only interested in material things and neurotically afraid of even considering talking to the person next to them. My authoritarian side says they should all be forced to be more open minded towards the people around them, less interested in material things and more in their spiritual well being. But of course it is easier to leave things as they are in this democratic society and complain about the decay of morals. Reading Mahfouz' "Children of the Alley" in which he describes humanity's spiritual journey from Adam and Eve onwards, I come to think that people in undemocratic societies were not necessarily less happy and something in me says that they might have had more dignity. But probably they would have been just as egoistic and materialistic as the people around me now. I guess the communist experiment went down to prove just that.

Now the trick is that I am sure some of the people around me have similar thoughts. If only I could know what they are thinking I would see that they are also concerned about their fellow humans and their spiritual growth. How to know that though? I guess I am trying to smile to people around me, to start conversations but it's pretty fruitless for sure. And all this thinking makes me go crazy - I guess I am thinking too much about the people around me. Tell me - am I crazy?

Well, the thing is that I want to work as a community developer and my feeling is that I should be a lot more at peace with all the different types of people which are hopping around. A community developer should help people help themselves to reach whatever goal they determine to be worthwhile. If that happens to be the plasma TV bigger than their very big and wobbely belly so be it. That's what a community developer should be able to do. I however, am very judgemental and underneath a facade of liberalism believe that I really got it all right and everybody else is wrong. More like a teacher than a community developer. But I want to be anything but a teacher. Please tell me: how can I find peace with myself and everyone around me? How can I accept that there's as many ways to happiness as there are people? Here again lies trouble - I do not think the majority of humans TRULY accept everyone around them as equal in every way. So why do I want to be special again and accept everyone as equal - even those who do not grant the same generosity to their fellow humans. I do not like holding the other cheek after the first slap and I know how impossible it is to love one's enemies. The Jesus-way is not sustainable because it makes Man indulge in their victimhood and suffering and it does not give them pride in themselves. It does not teach them how to walk upright and be beautiful. In fact the only way Christianity can imagine humans living together in peace is if everyone forsakes their pride and walks in humility. What a dull world. What we need is a world where we all can live in pride yet also duly respect each other.

Hello World

2006-10-11T21:46:00.000-07:00

Finally I am taking a step out into the open world by creating a blog. It's a daring venture I think. Why am I starting a blog? Too improve my communication with friends. Too say hello world here I come. There's so many thoughts in my head I think I will go crazy if I do not let them out, one of those muttering hermits, you know. I want to hear what other people think about these thoughts, I want them to tell me whether I am crazy or what. Reality check so to say. Yes, I am taking this rather serious. I am German you see.
Cheers, mr T