Living Off-Grid in Wales by Elaine Forde

Author:Elaine Forde [Forde, Elaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Rural, General, Research
ISBN: 9781786836601
Google: wZYMEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2020-10-15T04:18:33+00:00

4. More Problems with Community

This isn’t a community, it’s a village.

(Brenda, Y Mynydd)

What does it mean when people, such as Brenda, reject ‘community’? I use inverted commas here to make it clear that the rejection of the term community isn’t necessarily the same as rejecting the social entanglements that the term has come to stand for. Brenda’s statement was part of a conversation focused on perceptions about communality, and my wondering why there were so few – if any – obvious communal activities at Y Mynydd. Synonymous with the political character of the term community, Brenda’s sentiment encapsulates the wariness that residents felt about using it. ‘Community’ was regarded as a label anyway, and a particularly thorny one in the context of what many outsiders described as either a ‘commune’, or an ‘alternative community’. If the residents of one of Britain’s longest-standing eco-villages for the most part reject the term community, it follows that the concept warrants scrutiny.

4.1 Resisting Community

A certain ambivalence to community is not new. By the 1970s John Seymour, the back-to-the-land kingpin, already notes a certain resistance to community. In a postscript to a later edition of Fat of the Land (1974 [1961]) we learn that Seymour’s wife, Sally, who (one imagines) must have suffered quietly through years of floppy salads, penny-whistle-playing and sandal-wearing visitors to the Seymour smallholding, was particularly resistant to the idea of hosting volunteers, firmly stating, ‘Oh no – we don’t want to start some bloody community!’ In the eco-village world more generally, groups vary quite widely in terms of how much and what kind of collective action takes place. Using the term community implies a high degree of common purpose, cooperation and collective action.

Comparatively, the community concept seemed far less problematic to residents of the Tir Y Gafel eco-village. Here the idea of community at Tir y Gafel was interesting because of the Lammas organisational structure. Within this overarching governance structure, ideas about community were mediated through and projected by an organisational layer, by individual plot-holders’ dialogue with Lammas, and Lammas’s dialogue with external others. In theory, the individual plot-holders at Tir Y Gafel had no need to interact with each other because of this overarching Lammas structure. Even the character of plot-holders’ interactions with Lammas that became necessary (such as maintenance of infrastructures) differed, as they were specific to each plot.

Collectives

In policy terms, OPD calls for multi-household proposals to operate under a collective form of organisation. Technical Advice Note 6 (TAN 6), a supplement to Planning Policy Wales and the origin of OPD, states: ‘Where One Planet Developments involve members of more than one family, the proposal should be managed and controlled by a trust, co-operative or other similar mechanism in which the occupiers have an interest.’ OPD thus pairs its development model to a notion of collective or cooperative ownership, which itself seems radical for a planning policy. This example is particularly revealing of Graeber’s notion that the bureaucratic process is socially efficacious in its own right. Without a community ‘on paper’ there can be no community in practice under OPD.

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