pdf here

Losing Touch With the Changing Definition of "Community"

-a paper for Joel Kotkin’s New Geography

The last Digest has a few items on Local Government reforms and the nature of Community.

Joel Kotkin of New Geography asked me to consolidate these into an essay for his international readers.

The essay now appears at the New Geography web page here.

It begins as follows:

Mathew Taunton opens his review of “The Future of Community – Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated” (Note 1) with the observation that:

“Community is one of the most powerful words in the language, and perhaps because of this it is frequently misused. A profoundly emotive word, it is also a coercive one, and a key political buzzword in modern times. That community is being eroded in modern Britain is a matter of cross-party consensus, and it is also widely agreed that one of the state’s roles is to devise means of counteracting the decline of communities.”

Centre Funding.

Thanks to your support we have survived another month and hopefully will keep extending our life span month by month.

We will update you all on the fund-raising event on Alan Gibb’s farm – which is shaping up to be one of Auckland’s Great Days Out.

Thank you all again. You know who you are.

Remember, even a dollar helps.