Community and the human scale

I think there is a good connection we can make about community. How is it defined? When we ask what is the boundary of Asheville, we ask where our connection to the people around us ends. Arts, music and culture are the creative expressions of our city’s community. The businesses and government create the structure for the markets which support that city. UNCA, along with other schools, is in many ways the bridge between our cultural expressions and the necessity of economics. This all comes together to contribute to our place in the larger, global economy. I want us to examine the human scale of Asheville to learn more of how we fit into our global community.

How does that sounds as a guideline for a mission statement? I really want to get down to brass tacks and getting a more narrowly defined scope is essential. I think this sort of direction could help keep our options open and not necessarily exclude anything but still give us a structure we can work with.

Here is an outline where I drew these ideas from.

Key ideas:

1. Definition of what Asheville is
   1. How can we create our own limit of what we consider Asheville
   2. Is it the culture or physical boundaries?
   3. The economy
      1. What do people think about our current recession?
      2. Maybe perspectives on how Asheville fits into the larger global economy
      3. How do people see the future? Where do we go from here?
      4. The economy is how we all live our lives in the aggregate.  I think we like to believe we are individually separate from it but when the world economy collapses and as a direct result it becomes difficult to find a job in your home city, we need to think about how our day to day life fits into the larger picture. We are in a more and more tightly knit global community. What can we learn from Asheville about this?
   1. Community
      1. Do people feel they are a part of the city?
         1. i.      We could ask some very interesting questions about perspectives. How does the small business owner understand its place in the community compared with how guy on the street perceives small businesses?
      2. Bring together information about city functions
         1. i.      Research number of applications for events such as greek festival, etc
      3. How has music and art scene influenced perceptions of community?
         1. i.      I feel these are traditionally under documented fields because they don’t always yield quantifiable statistics.
         2. ii.      We should consider putting together a questionnaire. We could canvass a broad range of perspectives in a simple survey. I think this would work as a great way to support any conclusions we may be drawing from our interviews. Numbers are our friend.
         3. iii.      Music and art bring people together in a very non-materialistic way. We often want what the people around us can produce, not what can be centralized and distributed or out-sourced to China.  I think there may be a strong inclination toward this type of entertainment as a response to our global economic situation. I wonder if people have begun to think differently about how they live their lives and about the way they spend their money. Maybe Asheville was already moving in this direction before the bubble popped.
      • Community is a difficult topic to nail down but we should keep it in our heads. It’s important and may be a recurring theme.
   1. Healthcare
      1. This is such a hot topic right now that we need to be careful how we approach it. Its scale threatens to swallow everything we do. I want to include it somehow but in a way which is selective. I think we need a clear scope for the project before we try to incorporate this in.

~ by Adam on September 21, 2009.