Living In The World As If It Were Home

(h/t: Tim Lilburn for the title)

I’ve been a bit off the map of late due to a pick up of busyness in my personal life. As some have read in a variety of places, I am getting married in seventeen days and am moving into a condo that my soon-to-be-wife and I recently closed the deal on two days after the nuptials. Getting married and buying your first home is a lot to take on in the same time span, admittedly, and it has kept us running pretty fast from place-to-place and task-to-task for the past couple of weeks.

We chose to overlap the two in the way that we did because if you’ve got the work and the down payment to swing it, now is a pretty good time to be in the market for a home. And, well, the wedding has been scheduled for some time now. So I guess we represent one of the few bright stories from this economic catastrophe: we were able to take advantage of a depressed market to maximize our equity and leverage ourselves into a pretty fantastic home that has pretty much everything that we were looking for (including more than 1100 square feet of space).

More than a few people have commented that for the price we paid for the condo we could have bought a perfectly lovely house, which is true. We chose not to buy a house because we couldn’t afford one in the corresponding neighbourhood in which we wanted to continue living and so went about finding a condo in which it would be feasible to begin raising a family (hence the relatively monstrous square footage).

Now, there is more going here than just a snobbish desire to live close to downtown on our part and it relates back to our ongoing discussions around g/localism. Granted my soon-to-be-wife and I have a loathing for the idea of having to move ourselves out to the suburbs if we want to start raising a family that is perhaps only rivaled by our loathing for the community association in the neighbourhood we are moving just outside of. It is fair to say that we like our neighbourhood and were not prepared to give up for the promise of a house. But we also happen to be philosophically opposed to the notion that for younger people, having a family means leaving the downtown core.

As burgeoning families spill out of the downtown cores of various cities across the continent, the natural outcome is that those cores of much desired property become less and less family friendly. If you don’t have any families living in those areas, then the needs and interests of those families aren’t taken into consideration when a whole host of decisions are made that affect those areas.

It’s pretty simply math.

We’re the kind of folks who both have the right type of chutzpah to want to try to change that by refusing our cultural marching orders and who happen to think that a child can have just as good — if not, frankly, a better — childhood living in a downtown core in the appropriate neighbourhoods as they might otherwise have in the suburbs. I grew up in the suburbs, as did Brandy, and neither of us hated our childhoods, but given a choice, we both would have opted for a more authentically urban childhood and would like the opportunity to provide that kind of experience to our child.

Our future child’s life aside, there is an attachment that extends beyond the limits of mere trendiness holding us to this particular place: we consider it home.

Where relatively affluent and highly mobile people ought to properly call home was one piece of an excellent article by Patrick Deneen some time back over at Front Porch Republic examining the question “what is to be done” by any variety of localists. In that article, Deneen commented,

Many of us – whether because of circumstance, such as our professions, or background, such as an upbringing in the suburbs – cannot easily make choices that would demonstrate our full commitment to a more rooted life in a small town or even our home town. For many, there is no “going home again” because many of us come from places that cannot properly be called home.

I understand that in teasing out those two sentences from a more than 2,400 word essay I am being more than a touch nit-pickety, but I think there is an important element of my critique of solidarity towards localists at play here and it factors quite heavily into my recent prescient familial decision. I find it curious this notion that there are some places that cannot properly be called home, because they… don’t fall into the romanticized notion of what we like to imagine as “going home”?

I mean, there is whole persuasive argument that localists regularly make about the economic impacts that the tattered floodgates of brain and money drain have inflicted upon small town America. The same story can be heard in a variety of towns throughout the Canadian Shield, as well. And so in these cases, there is a cry from localists to say, “Your hometowns are dying and they need you. They not might be as flashy and glitzy as the big metropolitan meccas, but there are wisdoms and traditions and lineages there that will be the Rosebuds of your future.”

I hear that call and I recognize the sincerity and intelligence there within expressed.

But this doesn’t seem to be the thrust of what Deneen is suggesting when he claims that some places “cannot properly be called home”. Indeed, it would be fool hearty for me to approach my partner and say, “Honey, I know that neither of us has ever lived there, but I think we should go and move to Trochu, Alberta because there we will experience a more authentic way of living.”

“Are you insane?” would likely be a charitable response to my conjecture, not the least because we currently live in my partner’s hometown. The fact of the matter is that both she and I were born in larger metropolitan Canadian cities and our moving to a smaller town to realize a more authentic way of living would be an insincere gesture unbefitting of either ourselves or the townsfolk we would blindly imposing ourselves upon. And in perpetrating this fraud, we would have the added disgrace of moving away from home to do so at a time when, I would argue — in response to Deneen’s, and by extension, Daniel Larison’s question: what is to be done? — our hometowns need us more than ever.

More on that in a second

But none of that factored into our decision to stay basically put because the fact of the matter is that while we might live on the outskirts of a downtown core of a soon-to-be/if-not-already major Canadian city, we also happen to be a part of community that we are simply not willing to leave behind. Socio-political-philosophical arguments about changing the dynamics of downtown cores so that they are more livable and family-friendly aside, we have become extremely attached to an area and its attendant community that Professor Deneen may well be inclined to describe as not “properly [to] be called home.”

The reasons for that attachment to that community stand in stark similarity to a lot of the arguments that localists make about why there ought to be revitalization of the tenets of small town life: most of our close friends live in the area, most everything we utilize as a couple (and soon-to-be-family) are in the area, we created the luxury of being able to walk 99% of the places we go, we know many of the local merchants in the area and have a relationship that more closely approximates what an organic capitalism ought to engender, we are able to lessen our load on the environment as a result of the lifestyle we are able to maintain in the area, we feel invested in the community itself and wish to contribute to its well-being and its future, we believe our child/children will benefit greatly from the civic environment that we are helping to build… and on the list goes.

The short answer here is that this community, though it is stuck in the middle of a large metropolitan city, is home to us, and so my own life experience stands as a direct challenge to Professor Deneen’s suggestion that “some places cannot properly be called home”.

The divergence here has something, I think, to do with our conception of what constitutes community and a seeming pervasiveness on the part of localists in defining community — and by extension home — in overly and unhelpfully narrow terms. Reading a broad cross section of localists, it becomes evident that their conception of community necessarily involves specific regional criteria that I simply don’t find convincing.

Again, I’m sympathetic to cries about the crumbling status of small towns. But to believe that only small towns can house something properly called community is to take a sort of a priori stance on community that involves the going back to a state that once obtained and has since been lost.

On the contrary; however, my experience has shown that community, rightly understood, is a generative phenomenon that can arise a posteriori via the actions and intentions of any number of different groupings of people. That these groupings can vary from community to community means that the surface features of those communities will, by definition, vary as well. But as anyone who has spent some time in and expended some attempting to generate community in their locality can tell you, there is a deeper undercurrent of similarity that binds in the face of those differences.

There is a texture to those places wherein community exists that conveys itself in a myriad of subtle but ubiquitous gestures to even the itinerant layperson.

But the point here is that community can spring up in any number of different places based on the intentions and efforts of the people in those places. No doubt there are helping and hindering physical and economic elements that obtain in the locality in question, but those elements do not intrinsically determine whether community might be capable of flourishing in one place or another.

Community is a people focused phenomenon to a large extent and so we ought not to write off certain groupings of people because they happen not to live in a small town. And where we might find community, we should also expect to find people who consider that community and the physical location that houses it home.

This movement away from an overly narrow definition of community and home is in part a demarcation of what I keep harping on as a movement from localism to glocalism that doesn’t involve a fundamental abandonment of those principles of localism that make it what I take to be a powerful and important way of seeing the world. In short, we benefit when we attempt to live in the world as if it were home, no matter where that living happens to take place.

One step further, I take it to be incumbent upon localists to come to terms with the fact that they have hit upon a set of values that are useful beyond particular regional boundaries. In globalizing the local — or even just extending its reach into larger urban centres — we free those values to work their influence and positive impacts on a much greater cross section of people in a much greater numbers of localities.

In so doing, I take the movement from localism to glocalism to be, fundamentally, a freeing of the power of localist insight.

And so I think here we get around to addressing the core question asked by Deneen’s article: what is to be done? We also make our way back to my claim that those of us who call metropolitan landscapes home have an urgent role to play in remaining in those areas, for it is not just our smaller towns that are currently embattled for their souls. As Deneen rightly notes, there is a rootlessness prevalent in our major urban centres that is rendering them increasingly devoid of feeling and meaning. Seen simply as weigh stations, those urban centres continue not only to subtly self implode, but also remain major contributors for the very cultural and political problems that localists seek to address.

By taking a glocalist stance and extending the lines of our battle field into those areas, we address many of the troubling concerns I raised at the beginning of those piece, while at the same time striking a blow against the dominant norm that is leeching the continent’s smaller towns and cities of their life’s blood. Our double headed attack is, of course, predicated on the fact that the troubles besetting smaller town America/Canada are inherently linked to the dominant norms at play in their larger counterparts, that are concurrently feeding those norms while tearing themselves apart in the frenzied search for more and more.

By broadening our definitions and understandings of this challenge, we don’t just revitalize the local, we export the local to people who can instantiate it across a broad spectrum: we globalize the local. In so doing, we don’t just save the local, we allow the local to thrive and become the new norm through its cross-pollination with the global. We provide a call for a new way of living and we help to save the homes of those who were not born in a small town but still seek an authentic way of living.

This is a way forward that does not hearken to some fantasy rebirth of the past, but grapples with the realities we face in the present and provides foundational solutions to the challenges of that reality that are available to anyone. This is, I believe, a key building block in answering the question, “what is to be done?”

So I take Deneen to be quite correct when he says that Front Porch Republic is playing an important role in the “what is to be done”. I dare say that by allowing for an expanded conception of localism, they could enable others to take the fight from a handful of communities across the continent and the Internet into the very stronghold communities that play Goliath to their/our David.

And if we are David, then we must approach this challenge like David, who won not because of his might or the overwhelming power of his weaponry, but because knew well how to use the slingshot at his disposal.

Image via Flickrer Brian Dunlay

Tagged as: Community, front porch republic, generative community, glocalism, home, localism, metropolitan centres, patrick deneen, small towns and cities