ABSTRACT
The idea that we are living in a postmodern society has been a topic much discussed in recent times. In the postmodern society, group membership is more fluid and porous than in modern society. The old certainties of class, race, nation and gender that were the basis of the kind of society that emerged with industrialization have become contested categories in what is now an age of multiple belongings. But the postmodern age is also an insecure age which, in calling into question the assumptions of modernity, has made the problem of belonging more and more acute. The quest for belonging has occurred precisely because insecurity has become the main experience for many people. Even the very notion of society has been called into question, along with all kinds of fixed reference points and stable identities. Inevitably this questioning of previously-held assumptions has also had implications for the idea of community, which has suffered the same fate as the societal discourses of nation, class, gender and race. The experience of contingency has entered into the very category of community itself, but this has not led to a decline in community. For some it has meant a crisis, and one that began with the recognition of the crisis of the local community based on shared local space (see Chapter 3). But for Melvin Webber, the modern city in fact offered the possibility for a different kind of community that is not based on face to face relations, but a ‘community without propinquity’ (Webber, 1967).
