Have you ever heard of a "Community", do you know the word "resilience"? If your answer to both questions is 'no', I'm sorry to tell you that you are out of date.
We begin with this article what is expected to be a series, stressing that it will not be an extensive research work but a few brushstrokes that allow us to make a composition of some of the new forms of coexistence that are emerging outside of what has been known so far: village -> town -> city -> megalopolis.
Photo by Joey Kyber on StockSnap
According to the UN, the world is becoming increasingly urbanized. Since 2007, more than half of the world's population lives in cities, and this number is expected to increase to 60% by the end of this decade. It seems, from this statement, that the global migratory movement has a single direction, from the countryside to the city, but it is a fact that there is an almost subliminal current that goes in the opposite direction.
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Imagen de wirestock en Freepik |
For some decades now, groups of people with more or less common interests or intentions who decide to (con)live in a defined space have begun to emerge. Whether they are defined or configured as ecovillages, communities (or communes, a term used with pejorative overtones originating in the hippie protohistory), coexistence spaces or any other epithet in use, the underlying fact remains the same: people who decide to get together and experience themselves in a closer, participative and conscious way, to the extent of their possibilities and independent of the number of people that make it up (as my brother Madas says: '2 already form a community'), which usually varies a lot over time.
In this article we do not intend to analyze the bases, motivations, typologies, objectives, means and resources of these entities. In this first installment we will limit ourselves to showing examples close to our human time scale, although there were probably previous attempts with more or less success in the remote past. |
As a first sample we chose Auroville. The choice is not arbitrary, as this community in southern India is the direct inspiration for our project.
A DREAM
There should be somewhere on earth a place which no nation could claim as its own, where all human beings of goodwill who have a sincere aspiration could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority, that of the supreme truth; a place of peace, concord and harmony where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his sufferings and miseries, to surmount his weaknesses and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities; a place where the needs of the spirit and the concern for progress would take precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the search for pleasure and material enjoyment. In this place, children would be able to grow and develop integrally without losing contact with their souls; education would be given not for passing examinations or obtaining certificates and posts but to enrich existing faculties and bring forth new ones. In this place, titles and positions would be replaced by opportunities to serve and organise; the bodily needs of each one would be equally provided for, and intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority would be expressed in the general organisation not by an increase in the pleasures and powers of life but by increased duties and responsibilities. Beauty in all its artistic forms, painting, sculpture, music, literature, would be equally accessible to all; the ability to share in the joy it brings would be limited only by the capacities of each one and not by social or financial position. For in this ideal place money would no longer be the sovereign lord; individual worth would have a far greater importance than that of material wealth and social standing. There, work would not be a way to earn one’s living but a way to express oneself and to develop one’s capacities and possibilities while being of service to the community as a whole, which, for its own part, would provide for each individual’s subsistence and sphere of action. In short, it would be a place where human relationships, which are normally based almost exclusively on competition and strife, would be replaced by relationships of emulation in doing well, of collaboration and real brotherhood. The earth is certainly not ready to realize such an ideal, for mankind does not yet possess the necessary knowledge to understand and accept it nor the indispensable conscious force to execute it. That is why I call it a dream. Yet, this dream is on the way of becoming a reality. That is exactly what we are doing on a small scale, in proportion to our modest means. The achievement is indeed far from being perfect, it is progressive; little by little we advance towards our goal, which, we hope, one day we shall be able to hold before the world as a practical and effective means of coming out of the present chaos in order to be born into a more true, more harmonious new life. The Mother, August 1954 |
The community was finally inaugurated in 1968 and is sponsored by UNESCO and the government of India. After 50 years of continuous development, its structure has become more complex and is beginning to take the shape of a city envisioned by its founder. If you want to know more, we recommend you to visit the website of the Auroville International Association Spain: http://auroville.es and Auroville's own website: https://auroville.org.