Introduction.¹

In our society, which has become so atomized, it seems that we have lost the ability for community to just occur. This tendency is contrary to traditional sociological theories of community (e.g. Weber, Durkheim, Tonnies) whose ideas were based on urban and rural models of experience and the seeming dissolution of community in harmony with the industrial revolution. Today frameworks of pluralism and difference are being contemplated in effecting a deeper pragmatic understanding of what a ‘community’ is. A common saying in co-housing² expresses this transformation well: ‘we are trying to create consciously the community that used to occur naturally.’ In considering this problem what matters to us is the pursuit of a space to experience our own lives as significant; a locally meaningful set of social relations that will satisfy the human need for authentic contact.

We believe that examining leisure as an (in)activity that builds and sustains community connection opposes the forces that deny us a metaphorical and literal place to stand. When we examine the relationship between the characteristics of community and the concept of leisure, this invokes two fundamental questions: What are the elements that support and sustain community connection over time? What is leisure really and why do we need it for community? In this article, we aim to extend the usual understanding of leisure by demonstrating its critical role to community.

More than just extolling the virtues of withdrawing from the routine activities of work, duty, and obligation in and of themselves, we emphasize leisure's pleasurable aspects and the fact that it may or may not involve the production of anything tangible in contemporary North American society's understanding. In short, we define leisure as the time that one spends as one pleases. In doing so, we are advocating that this may mean doing nothing. Done for intrinsic purposes, doing nothing is as integral to community building and maintenance as is doing something.

For the most part, the objective of this article is to raise questions that emerged in dialogue between a sociologist and a co-housing consultant. We thought it worthwhile to aim for simplicity and substituted academic or technical words for those that are more commonly used. This did change the meaning a little, but we thought that it would be valuable to broaden the potential audience of this article. In defining leisure in these terms, we are acknowledging that time is considered an extremely scarce commodity and that ‘efficiency’ is a premier value in our culture. For us, this has meant that much of our leisure activity has been undertaken with an eye towards productivity. Focusing on the efficient development of skills and abilities in the time that we have away from work, or merely ‘killing the time’ when we choose not to work means robbing it of much of its redemptive and pleasurable qualities. We suggest that leisure time should be an opportunity for acquiring wisdom (understood as essentially self- knowledge) and a balanced emotional and mental life. The result of such wisdom is the realization that contributing to community, including the non-human world, is vital to the health of contemporary society. And yes, we do mean the simple act of ‘hanging out’, people relaxing and having fun together.

Community, Classroom and Cohousing.

There are two separate but connected points of departure for this article. One is Robert's teaching of a Sociology of Leisure class to 20 students at Simon Fraser University (hereafter referred to as SFU) in Burnaby, British Columbia. The second is Ronaye's joining the class as a guest speaker for an afternoon session. Ronaye's background is in urban planning and, for the past four years has been facilitating the development of co-housing communities.

Co-housing participants believe that more socially, environmentally and economically sustainable communities result from a resident-driven, consensus process. Innovative financial models have been developed which provide flexibility and greater affordability. Legal and organizational structures that allow for full participation by all stakeholders provide the framework for the ongoing decision-making processes. Full disclosure and transparency foster accountability which enables meaningful participation and develops trust in the process. The most sustainable solution is defined as one that includes a diversity of viewpoints in a consensus decision making process. When an individual blocks consensus, they are committing to spend time and energy to come up with a solution that will work for everyone. This is a process that puts everyone on equal footing, avoids power struggles or political efforts to gain a majority, encourages everyone to participate by communicating openly and creates the opportunity to see a variety of points of view. It is a powerful dynamic for building and sustaining community.

This model has been evolving for more than thirty years and has been used in the creation of hundreds of successful communities. Instead of the usual scenario in which a developer builds housing for sale to owners who have no relation to each other, a diverse group of people, often strangers to start with, will come together and form their own development company. There are many reasons why individuals may choose to become part of this, which is why the resulting community is typically so diverse, however the main reason is the belief that having more connection with their neighbours will improve the quality of their lives. The setting can be urban, suburban or rural and can involve building new houses, townhouses and apartments, or rehabilitating existing structures. The design can take a variety of forms, depending on the wishes of the group. The common area, referred to as the common house, is a place where residents of all ages can meet, share meals, celebrations or any other event of interest to the community. Typically the common house will include a kitchen, dining room, children's play area, shared office, workshop, guest room, laundry and common gardens.

To sum up, although the homes are always fully self-contained and individually owned the residents have access to shared facilities. The overall intention of the design is to create opportunities for interaction among neighbours. Co-housing, as an example of efforts to create leisure and community, is neither a definitive answer to leisure or community. Co-housing is a recognition of and response to the complexity of engaging leisure time so as to foster authentic social relations, despite our propensity for inhabiting rabbit warrens.

Ronaye's direct link to the Sociology of Leisure class was the planning process being undertaken by the SFU administration to create what they call an ecologically innovative and responsible ‘model’ community on the mountain where the university resides. As mentioned, the students in Rob’s class used the planning process as a focal node for examining leisure.

Adjacent to Vancouver, this 200 acre space is a distinct, isolated, and diverse representation of cultures and classes that reflects the similar trend in the highly urbanised population that surrounds this mountain-top institution.³

Although SFU is 30 years old, the interaction and connectedness that are necessary ingredients for experiencing a sense of community seem to be lacking. Realising the vision of a vibrant, living community has inspired initial plans which include introducing residential and commercial development to the lands within the immediate vicinity of the university. These plans, which have yet to be finalised, involve enlarging the student complement who live on campus to roughly twice its overall current size of 5,000 in a separate student enclave. In addition, approximately 5,000 non-student residents whose numbers may eventually grow to 10,000 may also reside in the new development. According to current plans, half the non-resident population is expected to reside in a separate family-oriented development and another (also separate) development will involve 10 story condos where it is envisioned that young people or ‘empty nesters’ will reside. The radical changes that these new residents could introduce to the current environment can be only conceptualized by pondering 15,000 people ‘parachuting’ into a 200-acre area. This space will accommodate these 15,000 people by providing the residential developments with an elementary school, a park, commercial ventures and retail shops (where 220,000 sq. feet will be devoted). If the motivation is truly to develop a living community, then the question arises, what process will ensure that the resulting development is not simply more of what we have already created in our isolated city neighbourhoods?

Community and, Therefore, More Leisure.

Community, and specifically the maintenance of the community in the face of social change (industrialization), has always been one of the central areas of concern for sociologists. In sociology, community has historically been characterized by interaction or association, common values, security or familiarity and common territory. It is people sharing common ties of family, friendship, worship, and outlooks as these are produced through interaction. Community has also been described as a site of rule-bound behaviour; a locale where associations are forged based on logic and rationality, a place where roles determine relationships between neighbours.

People assume that these characteristics of community circumscribe the possibilities and they do not. The problem is that these elements of community have become products and/or functions of the way community has been structured by capital. In short, competition and individualism guide our obsession with personal property, which, in turn, gives rise to the form and content of our interactions. It is our contention that these features do not describe, but rather construct community, that à la the Truman Show, community is being imposed on people through its conceptualization. Indeed, when examined in depth, questions arise about the ‘factors of community’. What is meant by interaction or association? Is it enough to make eye contact and say hi as you pass on the street or is it about more than that?

We would say, in response, that a ‘hi’ is necessary but not sufficient, and needless to say even this simple connection is severely lacking in our modern urban environments. These little conventions are incredibly important as the initial building blocks of communication and caring. Indeed, much of our social world is the product of patterned small-scale interactions. However hellos or similar will ultimately fail to build community if they are not superseded by subsequent interactions. What this also means is that the eye contacts and hellos of the world do represent the possibility for interaction to occur as well as sustaining it. In Stratchona where I, Rob, live in East Vancouver, many obligations are shared informally. Sadly, in part this is because of concerns over crime. Fear seems to very often be the glue that binds us in the society that we have created. The norm, in more connected neighbourhoods, seems to be that suspicious people on the street are everyone's responsibility and, if all that you know is that someone you said hi to one day lives in that house, you do feel an obligation to care if it appears that harm may be coming to them.

Translating what happens in approximately four blocks or so into much larger populations is daunting, we are suggesting that leisure time expended on a greeting is a simple start. Most of the contemporary communities that we have created have replaced the face-to face-contact, which is a necessary ingredient for community to occur, with walls and fences, lawyers and strata councils. We ask, what is it that allows interaction or association to occur? What supports it and sustains it over time? If the answers lie in the sharing of common values, then what do we mean by common values? When you look at a co-housing community for example, you will see a wide variation in values; some are vegans, others are meat eaters, there are smokers and non-smokers, drinkers and non-drinkers, Christians and Sufis, heterosexual and homosexual households. We recognise that norms and values are very tricky because often it comes down to how these are prioritised as well as their mere existence. For example, having vegetarian eating habits might be trivialised by some as idiosyncratic surface behaviours that are unrelated to deeper values. Others, however, may attach a moral element to their vegetarianism, reasoning that their eating habits arise out of respect for other species. Consequently, we think that tolerance itself is a value that should be respected and is probably one of the key elements necessary for developing community in modern times. It is certainly one of the basic principles in consensus decision-making, which is such an important ingredient in the development of a co-housing community, and supports the diversity that exists in that environment. Perhaps tolerance and acceptance are more valid as descriptions of community than common values.

Leisure and, Therefore, More Community.

The process of working together towards a common goal appears to be a key element that fosters community. The relationships that develop in that process become the foundation for ongoing community. But how do we relationship -build and -maintain in our current paradigm when people are reluctant to ‘spend time’ to simply develop relationships?

Our experience is that developing relationships does take time - time that our modern society no longer seems to have. Notably, leisure (and subsequently ‘at leisure’) in the Canadian Oxford dictionary has the following definition: 1. free time; time at one's disposal. 2. enjoyment of free time. 3. opportunity afforded by free time. - At leisure 1. not occupied. 2. in an unhurried manner. Reading this, one is compelled to think that time and/or leisure has become something that people rarely have in our modern society. So, if relationships are a necessary aspect of community, and if relationship takes time, then it follows that we need more leisure if community is to occur. A huge question that we face then is how do we create more leisure?

One of the reasons why people get involved in co-housing is the belief that the sharing (equivalent to less work, more time) of resources and energy will result in more opportunities for leisure. Co-housing then, offers a solution to one of the challenges that we face as a society: how do we create more opportunities for leisure? If co-housing is the answer, then by definition just having the physical space for leisure to occur is not enough. The reason that co-housing makes sense is because, to repeat, leisure is more about time than anything else and lack of time, as much as than anything else, is why we have become a society that works, and very often plays, alone. It involves other things as well: mobility, especially in relation to jobs, nuclear family focus, living in large cities, places where people gain anonymity and work separated from where people live.

Undoubtedly, all these things together make it harder to ‘hang out’ after work with the people we know best - those we work with. In short, leisure has become less possible for us because the demands on the individual have become great enough at this point in our history to warrant many dreams of alternatives. The solution that co-housing represents is as a way to bring our energies together in, for example, sharing cooking or childcare duties, shopping, bulk purchasing to reduce costs, and car sharing becomes more likely because you are in a community with people who you know and trust. As mentioned, doing so can be a challenge because we have become so accustomed to working alone.

Some people, including those who are involved in the co-housing movement, believe that community evolves as a result of a process. The process develops physical manifestation, which helps to sustain community over time, but as experience has shown, the physical form does not, in itself, cause community to occur. It appears that the opportunity engendered in structure is not enough, there needs to be something more. But what is the ‘glue’ that binds us? What is the commonality that makes it a community? For us, it is the caring attitude that results from authentic contact.

Community, Leisure and Sustainability.

Whether historically accurate or not, when we look at communities of the past, they do seem to resonate with our desire for stability by fusing commonalties and intolerance for differences. Certainly there is a lot going on in our love of heritage: authenticity, continuity, certainty, collective identity etc. The point is that every one of these concepts projects onto our Western world the idea that we have become so fragmented that we can only look at the past in a nostalgic longing for guidance. We think that there was community that existed ‘back there’ at one time, an idea that may not have worked then and further may not work today. Two points matter here. First, if the foregoing depiction of the past is accurate, then we are merely given a clue as to the origins of the community as ‘defendable territories’ and the endemic alienation, which has followed. Secondly, that kind of community is not even relevant anymore and we need to evolve to another kind of community - one that can includes diversity and one which does not necessarily need to include common territory or like-minded values - other than those that protect the planet that we share.

When we function as a community, we understand that it is in our own self-interest to consider the welfare of others (including other species). More fundamentally integrative is our need to look at the planet as a community, and unless we do we will not survive as a species, where we see a very different dynamic. If we look at the complexity and diversity of the life on this planet, and if we believe that there is a purpose (e.g., God, determinism, teleology) to that which allows for a delicate balance to occur, then community must be diverse and complex if it is a microcosm of the whole. As such, complexity and diversity appear to be ingredients that are necessary for sustainability. True community is the place where the forces of diversity and stability meet and we want this type of community because we want sustainability defined as a microcosm of the whole.

Sustainable development involves the process of equitable social, economic, cultural, and technological betterment in a way that does not pollute ecosystems and irrevocably deplete natural resources. Sustainability is seen as the cleaning up of past pollution and ensuring that chemicals, agricultural pesticides, and other contaminants do not destroy more species or damage the health of humans and wildlife. Sustainability may mean efforts to re-introduce some plants and animals that have disappeared from the area and an end to further wetland loss. Sustainability results when true community exists and does not necessitate an end to development.

Concluding Remarks.

What should be clear then is that lots of work and time need to be invested in the idea and practice of leisure if we are to build or maintain community. The question is where and how? We have, of course, suggested that co-housing is an answer. We realise however, that asking someone to change their living arrangements involves tremendous resources. So the question then becomes what else can we do to develop the caring attitudes that result from authentic connection?

A simple activity like a yard or garage sale can begin to open up possibilities for meaningful contact. If nothing else, these artefacts of urban life are beautiful examples of people willing to put their private life on display. Willing because money is involved perhaps, but what is interesting for this discussion is that, for a while at least, that almighty icon of individualism and class, private property, is transgressed. For example, as a PhD student leaving a small mid-western American town I, Rob, hosted a yard sale to get rid of excess books and furniture. Three years after I had moved in, on that day I was introduced to many of my neighbours who were only too happy to pour over the worthless bricolage of household items. I even had conversations with people who continued to drive by in their cars as they queried me about the cost of things.

We hope to have provoked critical reflections on the conceptual categories of leisure and community by advancing their interplay. The truly important thing about co-housing vis-à-vis this interplay is that co-housing is evidence of the possibility of creating a process that answers the big question: what connects us all? The process of constructing community is important and co-housing seems extremely promising for, as incongruous as it sounds, structuring a process. However, ensuring that the unstructured aspects of the process of forging and maintaining community receives attention demands leisure; moments to begin to [be] consider leisure as integral to community. This means, of course, that leisure itself must be taken seriously leading us to acknowledge doing nothing as important. Time, or rather extra time, the result of taking leisure seriously, may then predispose us to engage in the big task that is to seek out community, perhaps through co-housing. The logical extension of seeking community is the recognition and appreciation of diversity and stability; two concepts that are critical factors in an environmental ethic.

Notes.

References/Inspirational Works.

Hanson, Chris. (1996) The Cohousing Handbook. Hartley & Marks: Point Roberts : Washington.

Horna, Jarmila. (1994) The Study of Leisure: An Introduction. Oxford University Press : Don Mills, Ontario.

McCamant, Kathryn and Charles Durrett. (1994) Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves. Ten Speed Press : Berkley, California.

Postman, Neil. (1985) Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Penguin Books : Toronto.

Rojek, Chris. (1985) Capitalism and Leisure Theory. Tavistock Publications : New York.

Rojek, Chris. (1995) Decentring Leisure: Rethinking Leisure Theory. Routledge : London.

Rybczynzski, Witold. (1991) Waiting for the Weekend. Penguin Books : New York.

Shivers, Jay S. and Lee J. DeLisle. (1997) The Story of Leisure: Context, Concepts, and Current Controversy. Human Kinetics : Champaign, Illinois.

The Cohousing Journal - a quarterly publication produced by The Cohousing Network (the following websites [www.cohousing.ca/www.cohousing.org] have information on how to obtain a copy)