Learning to become good neighbours (again)

Pop quiz hotshot. What is the name of your next door neighbour? And across the road? If you're like me and plenty of other suburbanites, you've probably not met or spoken much with your neighbours. Or worse, with your colleagues. This isn't your fault (well it is, but you have mitigating circumstances).

Because of the chase to work, and the rush home to live, there is very little time for the touchy feely stuff (like smelling flowers and inviting the neighbours for a cup of tea).

But whether we like it or not, we will be meeting our neighbours in the future as our lifestyles and workstyles become increasingly local.

What is the force driving localisation (as opposed to globalisation). Well, simply skyrocketing resource and in particular expensive energy prices.

People are increasingly going to have to make do with what they have closer to home. Additionally, there is going to an increased demand for walkable communities, and urban design that facilitates both car free environments (bye bye ugly parking lots) and more urban diversity. After all, while we may not care how far we have to drive, when you walk you want somewhere (nice) to walk to...

The real world plugging back into the environment is underway, moving gradually. This is also well underway virtually, where social media is resuscitating to some extent the stagnated social networks that suburbia promised (but never delivered).
The thing that basically prevented people from talking to each other is becoming increasingly troublesome, and some feel that it faces some kind of obsolescence. That thing is the motor vehicle. It is a thing that insulates and isolates, people see and move by each other behind tinted glass shells, each box allocated a number, each box a separating entity.

For too long we have been not real communities living without any kind of social networking. Suburbia promised country living, but it has always been a mockery of the benefits, with all drawbacks and even curses of city living (crime, pollution, stress, health impacts, costs, distance from relatives etc).

We can start this process of redeveloping social networks online, but really, it needs to be lived out there, in places like Rosebank and those areas we call home. Home needs to be a place for ourselves and our neighbours, and our neighbours (tray of cookies and a Labrador in tow) need to come knocking on our doors too.

Have you been invited to my Rosebank?

You'll be in good company if you are. Jon Cherry, Matthew Buckland, Mike Stopforth and many other opinion leaders have been. If you are part of the Rosebank community, or have something meaningful to say, leave your email address in the comment field below and we'll be in touch.

The rationales behind the starting of this community are multifaceted.
1) Online social networks
Everywhere and nowhere

This particular article is fascinating for so many reasons. Here's a favorite quadrant of text:
We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social,” says Charlene Li at Forrester Research, a consultancy. Future social networks, she thinks, “will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.” No more logging on to Facebook just to see the “news feed” of updates from your friends; instead it will come straight to your e-mail inbox, RSS reader or instant messenger. No need to upload photos to Facebook to show them to friends, since those with privacy permissions in your electronic address book can automatically get them.

...avid internet users often maintain separate accounts on several social networks, instant-messaging services, photo-sharing and blogging sites, and usually cannot even send simple messages from one to the other. They must invite the same friends to each service separately. It is a drag.

Historically, online media tend to start this way. The early services, such as CompuServe, Prodigy or AOL, began as “walled gardens” before they opened up to become websites. The early e-mail services could send messages only within their own walls (rather as Facebook's messaging does today). Instant-messaging, too, started closed, but is gradually opening up. In social networking, this evolution is just beginning.

“E-mail in the wider sense is the most important social network,” says David Ascher, who manages Thunderbird, a cutting-edge open-source e-mail application, for the Mozilla Foundation...

2) At a time when we are rather at the mercy of governments and other civil authorities, volunteerism, activism and volunteer networks become not only useful, but essential and vital. We need civilians to aid in our own policing and protection, we need whistle blowers in our communities to alert us to problems with our food, and water and power supply. To the extent that communities develop strong relationships (through regional virtual and real networks) the communities can wrest back control of their own environments from 'administrators'.

In a recent article in The Star (MAKING A DIFFERENCE IS YOUR CHOICE) Mixael de Kock describes the enormous impact of volunteerism on the way society progresses. We have reached a juncture now where volunteerism needs to be resuscitated. In modern times volunteerism has died. The post-war (WW2) period saw its golden age.

Volunteerism asks us to be less self-centred. It asks us to put ourselves in other's hopes, including the flowers, the birds and the bees. What is happening to our water? Wouldn't bicycling to work be better? Mixael writes that we worship the free market, but the free market is a concept, not a human being.

It is now time to be human beings again, and human beings need to start doing what they were born to do: become self aware communities that improve the lives not only of other human beings, but every other life they touch.

3) A wonderful contemporary example of this vital embracing of our own (and other seemingly unrelated communities) is embodied in the Blue Sky Studio flick HORTON HEARS A WHO. 'A person is a person no matter how small' and 'Just because you can't see someone doesn't mean they aren't there...' are epithetis in this film that perfectly fit this ethos of a 'volunteer community'.

This is the human being as gardener and life giver. And it can start right here, with you, and with me.

What better time to start this process than during Easter, when we contemplate new beginnings, birth, in the context of death. This is the basis of all religions, it is merely a matter of semantics.
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