Geography 2410A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Telecommuting, Public Space, Imagined Community

• School: Western University
• Department: Geography
• Course: Geography 2410A/B
• Professor: Wes Kinghorn

Document Summary

The idea of community: the sense of identity and belonging provides people with meaning and structure to geographies of everyday life (geographers believe this is a worthwhile concept) Community is a structure of meaning or imagining (an abstraction, a mental concept) Communities are subjective, fluid, contested, used for political gains through appeals, important to members. Communities have positive meanings: solidarity, support, belonging, trust, familiarity. Communities have negative meanings: privilege unity over difference, generate social exclusion, set an unrealistic vision. Sense of place: meanings and identities given to space through imagination and experience: community is a sense of place. Geographic communities: social relations in locations, spatially bounded, scale varies local to global (neighbourhood planet: e. g. neighbourhoods: proximity, local territory, social homogeneity, time. Community of identities: social relations premised on shared attributes, spatially unbounded, individuals have plural communities. Organizational communities: a network or arrangement of social relations, informal to forma arrangements (informal family network formal professional organization), scale varies local to global.