Thinking Community / Creating legacy

A community is defined as a group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists.  A community is also a comprehensive built environment that addresses all aspects of people and place.  There are innate principles that all people would like to have as part of where they live.  Where a person lives is part of who a person is, and because of this, where they live reflects and affects who they are.  The process of creating a community is just as attentive to the impact on the lives of its future residents as it is upon neighborhoods and their relationship to places of work, worship, and recreation.

Presently, the general attitude seems to view our built environment as merely a commodity – a series of individual parts with no relationship to what exists around it.  Going a step further, a commodity-based mindset views every item as something to be identified within a given asset class to simply be packaged and sold.  A commodity is intended to merely be viewed as singular and separate in order for it to be sold as an individual part.  What sort of contribution is being made towards the creation of community if that is the attitude being taken?  A community yields something far greater, in its whole, than in the sum of the individual parts.    

As the built environment has changed, so have attitudes about and towards community.  People have become more individually minded and tend to think of community as merely representative of where one lives.  Community is far more than geographic location or proximity to others.  Community should be about others.  It should be about finding common characteristics that we all share with each other.  A shift in mind set needs to take place so that people again believe that community is about the collective whole, rather than simply the individual.  People need to project outward, rather than focusing inward.  The built environment can play an important role in working towards this end.

The habitat we create for ourselves has a lot to say about who we are as a society, not to mention the impact that it has on shaping us as people.  When the output is thought of as community building, both the ground rules and the priorities for what we do and how we do it are realigned and put into a more proper order and perspective.

We believe in the enrichment of people’s lives by not accepting status quo thinking about how our built environment is generated.

Instead, we embrace the methods and tools of community building which demand the opportunity for delivering distinct and inclusive neighborhoods that will provide for the daily needs of those that reside within them.

We are COMMUNITY BUILDERS! Let’s get this done.