Characteristics of the Community
Community characteristics affect the incentives for managing local resources. Whether a community is thriving or struggling, positive characteristics help to develop strong economic foundations. Communities form primarily around people. Some communities have a clear vision and ideals, and can act as a support network for members. Others have more informal networks of social relationships that encourage individuals to accomplish common goals.
Whether community members choose to gather physically or virtually, the locations in which they do so tell you a lot about their self-image and attitudes. Often, people in a community who have a strong sense of belonging will have certain affinities and interests that reflect the community’s culture. For example, many communities have a specific cuisine. These common foods help to tie the community together. They might have their own restaurants, bakeries or even grocery stores.
You need to know what other characteristics make up the community, such as demographics. Age, gender, race and ethnicity, education level and family size are important factors to consider when assessing a community. Other factors to take into account include the types and location of industrial facilities. Do these facilities produce pollutants, smells and noise? How close are these facilities to residential areas? Ultimately, knowing the characteristics of the community will help to determine how likely it is that people will work together to manage local resources.
What Are the Characteristics of the Community?
Community feeling refers to people’s attachment and identification with their neighborhood. People high in community feeling are committed to their neighborhoods, see their neighborhoods as unique and characterized by particular activities, and feel a strong sense of bonds among neighbors. They consider the welfare of others and the common good when managing community resources, and they also take future generations into account.
Moreover, they care about the common heritage and the story of the community and want to preserve it for future generations. On the contrary, people low in community feeling are egocentric and lack a shared identity with their neighborhood. They may try to show their superiority to other people by acquiring a dominant position or withdraw from social activities because they do not expect to be successful.
Different participants described community in different ways, but coding revealed 17 distinct definitional elements of community (Table 1A >). Core elements include locus, sharing, joint action, and social ties. Group-based elements of community, namely divisiveness, leverage, pluralism, and responsibility, are less consistently mentioned by the participants but are important in their understanding of community.
In addition to identifying the five core elements of community, participants also characterized various group-based characteristics. For example, a number of community members discussed how a sense of community can be strengthened by an internal culture that emphasizes the values of honesty, humility, and service. Other participants talked about the importance of shared experiences, such as a love for a particular cuisine. In some cases, local foods can even serve as a metaphor for the community.
Some of the stressors that undermine a community were discussed by most of our community members, such as drug use and crime. Other stresses, such as AIDS and the death of a loved one, were more common among San Francisco community members but also came up in Durham and Philadelphia. Regardless of the specific stresses, all of these factors indicate that communities can be both resilient and fragile. In terms of the latter, we found a relationship between the temporal consistency of a community and rates of user engagement.
Community governance refers to the structures and processes for decision making at a community level. This includes deciding what to do, how to do it and who should be responsible for doing it. It can also include resolving disputes, setting boundaries and maintaining the integrity of the community. In a community, accountability should be clearly defined and transparent so that everyone knows what is expected of them and how their actions can affect other members of the community. This means having clear appropriation and provision rules, conflict resolution mechanisms and graduated sanctions. It also means ensuring that these rules and policies are aligned with local conditions, as discussed in the next section.