Weaving People and Places: Art and Design for Resilient Communities

Contemporary societies are fragile. This observation becomes particularly clear when a catastrophic event happens. However, its tragic truth can also be recognized in everyday life events such as the increased migrant flow in Europe today. In cases like this too, a lack of societal resilience appears in breakdowns at every level: from the micro-scale of human encounters, to the macro-level of society as a whole.

What makes contemporary societies so fragile? There are several causes. One of them is the weakness, if not total absence, of communities-in-place: networks of people who are capable of recovering from unforeseen setbacks, can adapt to change, and learn from experience, or in other words, networks of people capable of behaving as resilient systems. Given that, the question could be: why does it happen? Why are communities-in-place disappearing in contemporary societies?

To cut a long story short, we can say that it happens because traditional communities (the tradition-based communities on which societies of the past were built) have progressively disappeared and the twentieth century intentional communities (the communities driven by strong ideologies and sense of belonging) are becoming weaker and weaker. In their place, loose, flexible, temporary social networks are spreading. The most evident effect of this transformation is that, while digital connections in virtual space are increasing exponentially, personal encounters in physical spaces are dramatically decreasing in both number and quality. The result is a society of displaced individuals: a fragile society with fewer and fewer communities-in-place.